My name is Hans Jakob Damsgaard. I have been working in the APROPOS project since August 2021. I am originally from Denmark from where I have received a B.Sc. in electrical engineering and an M.Sc. in computer science and engineering in 2019 and 2021, respectively, both from the Technical University of Denmark (DTU). In both degrees, I have focused on various aspects of digital systems design. As a result of this, I have co-authored a paper on hardware verification which won the best paper award at the IEEE NorCAS’21 conference.
My research interests include digital systems design, networks-on-chip, computer and accelerator architectures, hardware verification, and, as of recently, also hardware- and architecture-level approximate computing techniques. Outside of work, I enjoy video games, evening walks, hiking, and occasional travelling.
The title of my project is “Reconfigurable approximate accelerators for secure edge computing” (ESR 10). The most notable terms are:
- (Approximate) accelerators: Accelerators are specific hardware structures which can perform a specific computational function faster or more efficiently than a general-purpose processor is. Such architectures are often based around numerous copies of circuits implementing a specific arithmetic/logic operation and are, thus, natural candidates for exploring the energy savings arising from approximate computing.
- (Secure) edge computing: A relatively new computing domain wherein computing capabilities are distributed close to the end users instead of being centralized in cloud datacenters. As an example, a modern smartphone can be considered an edge computing device, which may perform computations on, for example, health data from a smartwatch or similar.
A final, equally important, term is reconfigurability, which refers to the ability of changing the functionality of a circuit in the field. It is an important measure for the flexibility of a final system and highly important to consider when targeting rapidly developing fields such as acceleration at the edge. During the project, I plan to find a few applications which would benefit from edge acceleration and develop a reconfigurable accelerator architecture for them.
I am happy to be part of the APROPOS project and for having been given the opportunity to deepen my knowledge in this exciting field and further propel my research career. Not only do I hope to gain valuable research experience and to leave a notable research impact during the project, I also hope to build an international network of research colleagues within my field.
