| Meet the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Guri Sohi Professor of Computer Sciences |
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Research area Computer architecture, parallel computing, memory systems and performance evaluation.
What excites you about your work?
“Being able to influence real commercial designs that are used by billions of people every day is exciting. I’ve been fortunate enough for nearly 40 years to be able to do that and develop different ways of solving the problems in the design of high-performance processors. These days, processing chips are used in so many devices, from mobile phones to cloud computing. They are ubiquitous, and billions of people use them every day. Having research ideas that started out as esoteric academic concepts actually being applied and influencing commercial products is great.
“Beyond my research, I am proud to have been the first Asian faculty member to receive tenure within the University of Wisconsin Computer Sciences Department. I was also one of the first people of color to serve as department chair of a big science department at Wisconsin and also within the top 10 Computer Science departments nationwide. My hope is that my background and accomplishments provide inspiration to other faculty seeking to make an impact in their fields.”
What do you hope to achieve?
“I’ve achieved more than I hoped to. In academic research, one always hopes to have an impact, and in my area, that means having an impact on commercial products. When I started out, I never thought that was something I could achieve. I never thought that in an academic setting in the middle of the country, far away from commercial hubs, we could do something that would impact commercial products. Actually, being far away from the action was a plus–it allows you to think ahead, without being influenced by current thinking. That’s been the great benefit of being at UW-Madison–it’s a top-notch place with top-notch people who aren’t constantly being influenced by the flavor of the day, which can happen on the West Coast, for example. UW-Madison has been a great place to carry out forward-looking high-impact research.”
Prof. Sohi’s innovations in parallel processing have been fundamental to the computing industry. His insights into commercially valuable improvements continue to make a very real impact in this technology space.
– Stephanie Whitehorse, WARF, Director of IP, Physical Sciences
Want to learn more?
Stephanie Whitehorse, [email protected], 608.960.9858