Dr. Sanjay Patel, Acting Co-Director IBM-Illinois Center for Cognitive Computing Systems Research, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign will give a presentation during the CAII Seminar Series on Monday, May 3 at 11:00 a.m. The talk is titled “A Startup Foundry Approach to Increasing Research Impact."
View Seminar here: https://go.ncsa.illinois.edu/CAIISpringSemesterSeriesSP21
Abstract:
At Illinois, as with many other top research Universities, we are always striving for our research to make a broader impact. Even for the most practical of results, the chasm from the laboratory to the real-world is a substantial and limiting hurdle. Crossing this chasm requires a connection to potential adopters, users, the marketplace, companies, investors, along with a commitment to building team that can enable the technology and build prototypes. For an institution like Illinois to create a high-scale pipeline of commercial translation, with many deep technology startups, we need to build a bridge across this gap.
In 2019, as part of the IBM-Illinois Center for Cognitive Computing Systems Research, we launched the Alchemy Foundry. Alchemy was envisioned as this bridge. Alchemy is an educational experience for our top students to create technology prototypes. Within Alchemy, students participating in teams of 4-6 students work for 18 months on a deep technology project that has potential for commercial or societal impact. These projects can come from our labs as promising technologies, from companies looking for solutions, from investors who see an unmet commercial need. In this sense, Alchemy teams create the prototypes that lead to the next phase of impact.
In those two years since we launched it, Alchemy has graduated eight teams, all of whom have focused on some form of deep technology creation, three of which have now formed into funded startups. I’ll present the story and technology of these startups and how Alchemy played an instrumental role in their formation.
Speaker bio:
Sanjay J. Patel is a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is the co-director fo the IBM-Illinois Center for Cognitive Computing Systems Research, and Technology Advisor on the Rokwire Initiative. Sanjay’s research has focused on computer architecture, and massively parallel chip design, with a focus on emerging use cases. For the past 15 years, he’s been involved in numerous startup activities, including as CTO of Ageia Technologies (acquired by Nvidia) and as CEO of Personify, Inc (acquired by Foxconn), and more recently, Uhnder, ROKMETRO, Trova AI, DigitalGemini, and EarthSense.
This presentation will be recorded and will be avilable on the CAII website shortly after the presentation.
