A team of Ph.D. candidates from Georgia Tech’s School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) and the School of Computer Science (SCS) have been awarded a 2023 North America Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship (QIF).

The winners, Payman Behnam and Jianming Tong, were awarded the fellowship for their project, “SUSHI: Model-System-Accelerator Co-Design for Real-Time Latency/Accuracy Navigation in Edge Applications.”

The research enables running machine learning (ML) models for interactive, real-time applications with greater accuracy, better responsiveness, and less energy spent. Specifically, the novel approach will enable a creation of family of ML models on a pareto-optimal curve for accuracy and runtime latency, and co-design schedulers and hardware to enable deployment of diverse models depending on the application demands and hardware availability.

The project will expand on the recent research published at the International Conference on Machine Learning Systems 2023 by Behnam, Tong, Associate Professor Tushar Krishna, and Assistant Professor Alexey Tumanov.

The QIF program invests in Ph.D. students across a broad range of technical research areas. As part of the award, Behnam and Tong will receive a one-year fellowship, during which they will be guided and mentored by experienced Qualcomm engineers, synergistically amplifying the success of their proposed research.

Behnam, a Ph.D. candidate in ECE, is advised by Tumanov in SCS, while Tong, a Ph.D. candidate in SCS, is advised by Krishna in ECE.

Notably, Tumanov was himself a QIF finalist in 2014, while Krishna was honored with a Qualcomm Faculty Award in 2021.

Behnam and Tong are the only Georgia Tech team to win a QIF this year, and the first team comprised solely of Georgia Tech Ph.D. candidates to receive the fellowship since 2019.

Last year, ECE Ph.D. candidate Rishov Sarkar, advised by Assistant Professor Cong (Callie) Hao in ECE, collaborated with Zhiwen Fan from the University of Texas-Austin to win a QIF.

Qualcomm Research’s top engineers carefully review submitted proposals and select the QIF finalist through a multi-stage process spanning at least 6 months, who are then invited to present their proposals to a panel of executive judges. The QIF program has experienced continued growth with over 100 proposals submitted each year in the U.S. and internationally, and has awarded over $15 million since it started in 2009 at Qualcomm’s Research Center in Silicon Valley, Cali.

Header image caption: Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship recipients Payman Behnam (left) and Jianming Tong.