prof. dr. ir. G.N. (Georgi) Gaydadjiev

I am a Computer Engineer active in the Industry and Academia for more than 30 years. In the 80-ies I studied at Voenmeh (current name Baltic State Technical University) in Leningrad, Soviet Union and thereafter worked at the booming computer industry in Bulgaria designing personal computers I/O peripherals for System Engineering Ltd in Pravetz. In the 90-ies I joined Pijnenburg Microelectronics and Software in Vught, the Netherlands and worked on various designs of embedded systems even before microcontroller-based systems were awarded this name. One of the products developed by my team won the Design and Engineering showcase award at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas in 1999. While working at Pijnenburg M&S, I also enrolled at TU Delft and successfully obtained a master of science in Electrical Engineering degree and got interested in testing of computer memory systems. Some of the algorithms developed by professor Ad Van de Goor and myself are still in use by the Industry. In 2002, I joined the Computer Engineering (CE) laboratory at the Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science (EEMCS), TU Delft as a faculty member and defended my PhD few years later. At CE my research focused mainly on Computer Architecture and Microarchitecture for reconfigurable, highly customized and safety critical computing systems. My research projects at TU Delft were funded by STW, the European Commission, point.one, CenterNovem/BSIK and Google Inc in USA.  Almost one decade after starting at TU Delft, in 2011, I received a personal grant by the Swedish Research Council (VR) and joined Chalmers University of Technology as a chair professor in Computer Systems Engineering. In the fall of 2014 I started my supposed-to-be-one-year sabbatical at Maxeler Technologies Ltd in London. In reality this became a multiple-years involvement that also led to the creation of Maxeler IoT-Labs BV in Delft in December 2017. At Maxeler in London I led the Dataflow Software Engineering division as one of the company’s Vice Presidents and focused on the research and development of highly customized High-Performance Computing (HPC) systems. Some of the above systems were able to outperform TOP-500 supercomputers in very specific tasks while using a fraction of the required electrical energy. At the same time I became a honorary visiting professor at the Department of Computing, Imperial College London where I currently have two PhD students. My team at Maxeler IoT-Labs works on the deployment of the Maxeler’s streaming dataflow technology outside of the datacenter in order to enable HPC capabilities close to the data sources and as such improve end-to-end system performance while reducing energy usage and costs. In August 2019 I joined the University of Groningen as a professor in Innovative Computer Architectures. The main focus of my research will be on advanced (digital and non-digital) highly customized computing systems able to satisfy the steadily growing computational needs of our modern society, and more particularly those of the scientific and engineering communities.