[hpc-announce] CogArch 2021 CfP: 5th Workshop on Cognitive Architectures (Co-located with HPCA)

[David Trilla Rodriguez1]

**Our apologies if you receive multiple copies of this announcement.***

CogArch 2021: 5th Workshop on Cognitive Architectures (Co-located with 
HPCA)

Website: www.corgarchworkshop.org

ABOUT
Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) techniques have 
become the de facto solution to drive human progress and more 
specifically, automation. In the last years, the world’s economy is 
gravitating towards such industry and the expectation of growth is not 
withering away. Additionally, these trends have been further exacerbated 
by the novel COVID-19 pandemic, which paralyzed the world’s economy and 
made evident the need for even more automation to provide safer and more 
reliable services and also to aid in the agile discovery of life-saving 
drugs and vaccines. To support those kinds of applications, cognitive 
architectures are designed and deployed to materialize advances in the 
aforementioned fields. However, although the newest cognitive designs are 
improving by the day, the amount of challenges ahead for cognitive systems 
is still overwhelming. With existing solutions reaching functional 
maturity, design considerations are now pivoting to new aspects like 
energy scaling, reliable operation, safety guarantees, or even security 
properties. This has led to a very diverse variety of hardware and 
software systems, either tailored to their specific applications or 
designed for general-purpose usage, which calls for a wider understanding 
of how cognitive architecture’s design should be tackled.

In that context, the CogArch workshop aims at bringing together the 
necessary know-how to design cognitive architectures from a holistic point 
of view, tackling all their design considerations from the algorithms to 
platforms in all the different fields that cognitive architectures will 
soon occupy, from autonomous cars to critical tasks in avionics or space 
or even personalized medicine.

The CogArch workshop already had four successful editions, bringing 
together experts and knowledge on the most novel design ideas for 
cognitive systems. This workshop capitalizes on synergizing industrial and 
academic effort in order to provide a better understanding of cognitive 
systems and key concepts of their design.

CALL FOR PAPERS
Hardware and software design considerations are gravitating towards AI 
applications, as those have been proven extremely useful in a wide variety 
of fields, from edge computing in autonomous cars to cloud-based computing 
for personalized medicine. The recent years have brought about a boom in 
start-ups and novel platforms that constantly offer improvements in 
performance and accuracy for the aforementioned applications. As this kind 
of cognitive architectures evolve, system designers have to incorporate 
many different considerations, and this has led to a very diverse field in 
terms of available solutions.

The CogArch workshop solicits formative ideas and new product offerings in 
this general space that cover all the design aspects of cognitive systems, 
from algorithms improving cognition to design methodologies that improve 
non-functional considerations like energy efficiency, security, agile 
design, programmability, or reliability.

Algorithms in support of cognitive reasoning: recognition, intelligent 
search, diagnosis, inference and informed decision-making.
Swarm intelligence and distributed architectural support; brain-inspired 
and neural computing architectures.
Agile design for cognitive systems.
Prototype demonstrations of state-of-the-art cognitive computing systems.
Accelerators and micro-architectural support for artificial intelligence.
Approaches to reduce training time and enable faster model delivery.
Cloud-backed autonomics and mobile cognition: architectural and OS support 
thereof.
Resilient design of distributed (swarm) mobile AI architectures.
Reliability and safety considerations, and security against adversarial 
attacks in mobile AI architectures.
Techniques for improving energy efficiency, battery life extension, and 
endurance in mobile AI architectures.
Case studies and real-life demonstrations/prototypes in specific 
application domains: e.g. smart homes, connected cars, and UAV-driven 
commercial services, architectures in support of AI for healthcare 
applications, such as medical imaging, drug discovery and smart 
diagnostics, as well as applications of interest to defense and homeland 
security.

CALL FOR PROTOTYPE DEMONSTRATIONS

CogArch will feature a session where researchers can showcase innovative 
prototype demonstrations or proof-of-concept designs in the cognitive 
architecture space. Examples of such demonstrations may include (but are 
not limited to):

Custom ASIC or FPGA-based demonstrations of machine learning, cognitive or 
neuromorphic architectures.
Innovative implementations of state-of-the-art cognitive 
algorithms/applications, and the underlying software-hardware co-design 
techniques.
Demonstration of end-to-end cognitive systems comprising of edge devices 
backed by a cloud computing infrastructure.
Novel designs showcasing the adoption of emerging technologies for the 
design of cognitive systems.
Tools or frameworks to aid analysis, simulation, and design of cognitive 
systems.
The workshop shall consist of regular presentations and/or prototype 
demonstrations by authors of selected submissions. In addition, it will 
include invited keynotes by eminent researchers from industry and academia 
as well as interactive panel discussions to kindle further interest in 
these research topics. Submissions will be reviewed by a workshop Program 
Committee, in addition to the organizers.

Submitted manuscripts must be in English of up to 2 pages (with same 
formatting guidelines as the main conference) indicating the type of 
submission: regular presentation or prototype demonstration. Submissions 
should be submitted to the this link by January 8th, 2021.

If you have questions regarding submission, please contact us: 
info at cogarchworkshop.org

ORGANIZERS
Roberto Gioiosa, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
David Trilla, IBM Research
Augusto Vega, IBM Research
Karthik Swaminathan, IBM Research
Alper Buyuktosunoglu, IBM Research
Pradip Bose, IBM Research

IMPORTANT DATES
Paper submission deadline: January 8th, 2021
Notification of acceptance: February 5th, 2021
Workshop date: February 28th, 2021 (Co-located with HPCA)