Who are you and what do you do? With whom are you collaborating (Partner)?
I am Javier Acevedo, and I am a doctoral student in the Deutsche Telekom Chair of Communication Networks at the TU Dresden. I am working on the development of hardware accelerators for signal processing kernels in 5G and 6G.
Since when are You a participant at Software Campus and why do you attend this program?
I joined the program in 2022, and the motivation to apply was to lead a project to do research that can create value in society. In order to achieve that goal, I searched what industry-leading companies were investigating, and I designed a project proposal with a focus on hardware acceleration applied to wireless communications using new and open-source architectures such as RISC-V.
What do You expect from Software Campus?
What I expect from the program is to build a network of really smart people with whom I can share my ideas and take on different perspectives in both research and entrepreneurship.
Honestly, it’s fascinating to me to see how companies are willing to showcase their research focuses, and in doing so I’ve discovered that products I’ve never seen before are at the forefront of the industry.
What is your IT-Project about – core topic – and how could it be used in the long run?
For this project, we intend to develop instruction set architecture extensions to accelerate the computation of channel estimation kernels for 5G. Channel estimation has hard real-time requirements, and therefore, data must be available to make decisions about the power transmission in a wireless link. Nevertheless, channel estimation is a compute-intensive task with plenty of matrix multiplications and inversions, and hence, it requires specialized hardware to compute the information about the channel on-the-fly. With the RISC-V ISA extensions, we seek to assess under which conditions hardware acceleration fulfills the requirements to compute the channel information.
Do you have some funny/exciting/surprising memories linked with computer science? What exactly inspires and fascinates you about computer science?
Every day, Informatics has a different challenge, which can be tackled from different perspectives. Therefore, informatics is not just about programming techniques, but about the reasoning that makes code able to solve problems.
What really fascinates me about this topic is that you can provide machines with computing and networking capabilities to control physical processes, such as data transmission over wireless links.
Did a specific (public) figure of computer science or management impress you in a certain matter?
I would say I have two: First, Linus Torvalds. I think that Torvalds represents technical excellence by definition and is the kind of type that would not give you any respect, unless you earn it. Then, implicitly, he pushes you to make you better. Without the Linux kernel and Git, software projects would not be as they are today.
Secondly, I would say Werner Voegels for his role in technically leading AWS and his work in distributed systems.
In your opinion, is there a ‘specific’ character trait which a high-level Manager should be fond of to be successful?
In IT, a manager also hast to have technical competences to lead engineering projects. Merely rhetoric would make it impossible to hire and lead highly qualified people that require a clear direction to be able to execute complex tasks under pressure.
Which was your most challenging experience along your career in computer science that You had to face so far?
To convenience software engineers about the benefits that hardware acceleration has to fulfill low latency requirements of many applications. Normally, hardware accelerators are seen as white elephants, a hyperbole to refer that hardware is hardware to program, maintain and design. Nevertheless, with the rise of high compute intensive applications, pure software solutions can just not fulfill the requirements.
Imagine the following scenario: There is an internet breakdown for a whole month. What would you do?
There are two projects I would like to spend time on:
For some time now, I have been interested in learning about the Austrian School of Economics. Therefore, on the other hand I would spend that time reading the book called “Wealth of Nations from Mises and the Road for Serdorm” from Hayek.
On the other hand, for some time now I have been interested in genetic engineering since DeepMind released the AlphaFold.
Next to your job and Software Campus, what makes your heart beat faster?
For some time now, I have been a real fan of Opera and I am fortunate to have the Semper Oper in Dresden. I think I am becoming a fan of the Russian language.
Source language of this interview: English & German
