For Yung-Hsiang Lu, improving the energy efficiency of computer technology to provide real-world benefits has been a lifelong focus.

“When I was learning data structures, I began to see things from a different viewpoint—how to make things efficient,” says Lu, a professor of electrical and computer engineering and a university faculty scholar at Purdue University’s Elmore Family School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, in West Lafayette, Ind.

In 2019, Akash Raju and his friends, Anuj Mehta and Kushal Negi, started hosting brand pop-ups at their school, Purdue University, in a quest to bring interactive shopping experiences to their rural — and often overlooked — West Lafayette, Indiana, campus. The events showcased local brands and small businesses and the trio ran their first stint out of the back of a moving truck parked in the middle of the school’s property. With graduation looming, the trio realized they could bring the same methodology to a new sector: short-term rentals.

The modest capability of the new PV cells is still remarkable for a something that is only in the prototype stage, Peter Bermel, an electrical engineer at Purdue University, told The Daily Beast in an email. People may not recall that early solar panels were so inefficient, they were laughed at by many skeptics, or that LEDs not so long ago were so dim, no one could possibly imagine a commercial use for them. These new PV cells could extend the life of solar panels and provide a reliable source of electricity for the more than 750 million people who live without electricity worldwide.

Purdue University researchers created technology that uses optical imaging to better help surgeons map out tumors in the body and help them understand how certain diseases affect activity in the brain. The work is published in the journal IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging.

Apple Air Tags can be helpful if you've lost your keys or wallet. But police are now warning people to be careful because they've received reports of Air Tags being used to follow people without them knowing it.
The quarter-sized gadget can go anywhere and connect to your phone to locate the item you can't find.

Researchers at Purdue University have recently developed new transistors based on indium oxide, a semiconductor that is often used to create touch screens, flatscreen TVs and solar panels. These transistors, introduced in a paper published in Nature Electronics, were fabricated using atomic layer deposition, a process that is often employed by transistor and electronics manufacturers.

Researchers around the world are continually finding new ways to prolong Moore's law. Now, Purdue researchers have found another means to this end: using an atomic layer deposition technique for indium oxide-based transistors.

Purdue University Professor Mark Lundstrom says almost every week he is talking with technology companies that are considering building a plant in various states, including Indiana, to manufacture microchips and other advanced systems. He spent a career working and teaching in the field of electrical and computer engineering and is a leading expert in semiconductor devices and nanoscale transistors. Lundstrom says the microelectronics industry is quickly changing and a global shortage of microchips is just a part of the puzzle.

But challenges await, including technical issues, regulatory barriers and many miles of highway.

Making sense of ML performance and benchmark data is an ongoing challenge. In light of last week’s release of the most recent MLPerf (v1.1) inference results, now is perhaps a good time to review how valuable (or not) such ML benchmarks are and the challenges they face. Two researchers from Purdue University recently tackled this issue in a fascinating blog on ACM SIGARCH – An Academic’s Attempt to Clear the Fog of the Machine Learning Accelerator War.