Human-Centered Architectures

Over the past two decades, computer architecture research has moved from general-purpose computing to domain-specific architectures. The field is on the cusp of a new revolution — human-centered architectures — driven by emerging platforms such as Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, and autonomous machines that intimately interact with humans: they continuously capture and interpret visual data from humans and generate visual data for humans to consume. These computing platforms must be designed, from the ground up, with principled considerations of humans.

Our goal is to achieve unprecedented computing efficiency guided by human perception and, more importantly, to augment human perception through computing technologies. The approach we take is to co-optimize computing with imaging and human perception, the two fundamental components that connect computing with humans. A computing problem that seems challenging may become significantly easier when one considers how computing interacts with imaging and human perception in an end-to-end system.