Dr. Nanditha Rao is Assistant Professor at the International Institute of Information Technology (IIIT), Bengaluru in the VLSI Systems group. She received her Ph.D. in electrical engineering from IIT Bombay in 2017. Her research interests include FPGA based acceleration for machine learning, RISC-V and radiation-hardened designs. She has received the SERB Core Research Grant 2018, MITACS Globalink Research Award 2018 and SERB SUPRA research grant 2022.
Dr. Rao believes in encouraging students in technology and leadership roles. She took up administrative roles such as General Secretary of a women’s hostel in IIT Bombay for which she was awarded the Institute Organizational Citation. She is currently the associate warden of women’s hostel in IIIT Bangalore. She worked as a hardware design engineer at Intel for five years prior to her Ph.D. Her work at Intel involved signal integrity simulations of PCIe, LVDS, DisplayPort and HDMI interfaces. She received 13 Intel Spontaneous Recognition Awards and one Intel Divisional Recognition Award.
During her Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence fellowship, Dr. Rao is working on improving the performance of hardware accelerators for convolutional neural networks (CNN). CNNs are most commonly used today in computer vision, and image and video processing. The CNN accelerator implemented using field-programmable gate arrays (FPGA) enables significant performance improvement and power efficiency compared to GPU implementations. However, to improve the performance on the FPGA further, it is important to explore the appropriate mapping of the accelerator architecture onto optimal FPGA resources, which is what Dr. Rao is focusing on during this fellowship.