Africa’s Tech Advantage, the Democratization of AI and Stanford Football with Professor Olukotun

artificial intelligence
1/27/2022

​As Chairman Young Sohn and Professor Olukotun discuss, HARMAN promotes that the mark of a good company are the ideas of the team and the ingenuity to implement them. Young and Kunle share their thoughts on the current state of Moore’s Law – not dead, but maybe on life support – and the importance of the data economy for today’s technology startups. Kunle shared of his involvement in Stanford’s football program, teaching parallel computing, and how one of his startups, Migo, developed apps to enable companies to extend credit to consumers and small businesses in Nigeria.

Kunle Olukotun

Kunle Olukotun

Co-Founder & Chief Technologist at SambaNova and Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Stanford University

​​Recently, as co-founder of SambaNova Systems, Kunle has developed an AI innovation company that empowers organizations to rapidly deploy best-in-class AI solutions in days to unlock new revenue and boost operational efficiency. Kunle is a Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Stanford University and he has been on the faculty since 1991. Kunle is well known for leading the Stanford Hydra research project which developed one of the first chip multiprocessors with support for thread-level speculation (TLS). He founded Afara Websystems to develop high-throughput, low power server systems with chip multiprocessor technology. The company was acquired by Sun Microsystems in 2002. The Afara microprocessor technology, called Niagara, is now at the center of Sun's throughput computing initiative. Niagara-based systems have become one of Sun's fastest ramping products ever.

Kunle recently won the prestigious IEEE Computer Society’s Harry H. Goode Memorial Award and was also elected to the National Academy of Engineering—one of the highest professional distinctions accorded to an engineer. He is actively involved in research in computer architecture, parallel programming environments and scalable parallel systems. He currently co-leads the Transactional Coherence and Consistency project whose goal is to make parallel programming accessible to average programmers. He also directs the Stanford Pervasive Parallelism Lab (PPL) which seeks to proliferate the use of parallelism in all application areas. Kunle became an ACM Fellow (2006) for contributions to multiprocessors on a chip and multi-threaded processor design. He has also authored a number of papers on CMP design and parallel software, and recently completed a book on CMP architecture. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from The University of Michigan.