Labs' Cat Graves named Inventor of the Year

[Curt_Hopkins]

Dr. Catherine Graves, principal research scientist and emerging accelerators team leader in the AI Research Lab of Hewlett Packard Labs, is no newcomer to awards, but this one was unique. The Silicon Valley Intellectual Property Law Association (SVIPLA) awards their annual Inventor of the Year not simply to innovators but those whose innovations have been deemed so useful they’ve been given patents.

According to the organization, Graves received the award “for her joint invention of an analog content addressable memory (aCAM), which makes the state-of-the-art machine learning techniques feasible in real-world scenarios.” These scenarios include use in IOT devices and autonomous vehicles.

SVIPLA notes the team Graves leads explores the uses of RRAM-based and aCAM circuits for accelerating diverse computational models, including tree-based ML models and finite automata processing for network security and genomics applications and that she has published better than 30 peer-reviewed papers, three book chapters, and has been awarded 14 US patents with 15 additional applications pending.

As to the honor of the thing, Graves said she understood the importance of the award when she saw the company she was in, including Shuji Nakamura’s name as the honoree in 2011 for the first bright blue LED and innovations on a number of laser types.

The work that got the award was an outgrowth of the work she does with the emerging accelerators team.

“Our group grew out of the material science group under Stan Williams developing new emerging RRAM memory technology, and along the way we observed other cool properties beyond just binary memory states. The device technology has continuously tunable analog states. And about five years ago we started investigating using these devices for computation rather than just memory.  In particular, with an architectural approach called “in-memory computing”, I can do useful computations where I'm storing these analog states and  design the circuit to perform useful computations. We have been looking at machine learning applications, including more interpretable and explainable ML algorithms, as well as no error complex pattern matching  for network security.”

Graves said she was humbled as well as gratified at the outside recognition of her group’s efforts. She may not feel terribly comfortable tooting her own horn, but others obviously have no such reservations.

“Cat’s inventions are the most exciting technology I have in my patent docket,” says Michael Febbo, senior counsel for patents in the HPE legal department and the person who nominated Graves for the award. “Much of the vigor of her work stems from how Cat and her team approach inventing. Frequent afterthoughts like robust error correction are baked into the core design. She and her team have a clear view of the final goal, which results in the fundamental inventions that we patent folks love to see.” 

Paolo Faraboschi is Grave’s supervisor in the AI Research Lab and underscores the fact that research is not all beeps and boops.

“Cat has a very personal management style, open to hear everyone’s opinion, and she emphasizes communicating a clear team vision and focus on important projects,” he says. “Cat’s work is at the center of an industry-wide renewed interest at the intersection of neuromorphic computing and explainable machine learning. Cat’s work is fundamental to advance HPE’s thought leadership in the area” and toward Trustworthy AI.