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Hello I'm Alex Yakovlev. I'm a professor of computer systems design at the University
of Newcastle-Upon-Tyne and I am one of the lucky ones to obtain a Dream Fellowship from
EPSRC.
Today I would like to address three important questions. The questions are -- what does
this Fellowship mean to me? How will I be spending my time during those two years of
the Fellowship? And essentially what do I want to get out of my Fellowship?
So what does this Fellowship mean to me? Well literally I think it is just to have dreams
during this time and obviously dreams would be much better if I had the freedom to dream
with this Fellowship. Freedom to think, look around, see beyond the usual horizons if visibility
allows to do so. Being different from the rest, also referring to this fellow to the
right of me, and thinking differently, differently to the way that I have been thinking and to
the way others think. It also means an opportunity to search not only for solutions that I don't
know, but also for the things that I don't know that I am not aware that I don't know.
So how will I be spending my time? Well, while I have time and money I would like to dream,
think, read, meet people, inspire them and be inspired, look for analogies which often
drive new ideas, new solutions. These analogies can come from the natural world, so they come
from physics, the areas that I don't normally spend my time on. I would like to write, talk,
organise seminars and perhaps start new projects and initiatives.
So what do I personally want to get out of my Fellowship? Well I will be looking for
a bunch of new problems, new directions for research, and new ways of interacting with
fellow researchers and students. These are the general things that I would like to do,
but I would also like to sit and think more technically. So I would like to be able to
see if I can make a difference in system design, micro electronic design, by showing the world
that one can build energy modulated computers. The traditional way of building computers
is based on the fact that we want to get gigahertz out of them and we would like to save energy
as much as we can. In this Fellowship I would like to explore areas where energy takes a
much more active role so, for example, this active role you can see in this mechanically
driven torch which produces light when you make mechanical energy. We can talk about,
for example, this ball which doesn't have any battery in it. It was produced some ten
years ago by a company that built electronic circuits called self-time circuits. This is
something that I also know how to do. When you hit this ball against the floor it produces
a very peculiarly sound which is being generated by the fact that you have energy stored in
an internal combustion. So I also have certain theoretical hypothesis that I would like to
pursue. One such hypothesis would be whether energy can be seen as a common measure of
computational effort, no matter whether the computers are analogue or digital or whether
we are talking about hardware or software. And I also have certain engineering puzzles
that I would like to solve. For instance can one build a sensor which is powered by the
energy from a signal that it sensors. Obviously such devices that could be built in this research
could be implanted in the human retina or they could be part of the implantations that
we have in different parts of our bodies. So these are the things that I would like
to do with this Fellowship. Thank you.