CEO Interview - Dr. Naveen Rao, Nervana Systems - Global Semiconductor Alliance

I’ve been thinking about artificial intelligence for a long time. I used to read a lot of Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke. It worked out in my favor that the big sci-fi trends in the mid 80’s/early 90’s seemed to all be centered around AI! This curiosity lead me to Duke University where I graduated with degrees in both computer science and electrical engineering with many classes in philosophy. During my undergrad years, I worked on neuromorphic circuits, which are circuits that mimic some of the behaviors that we see in biological neurons. I found it fascinating that you could characterize biological systems with signal processing approaches and vice versa. With my degrees in hand, I packed my bags and moved to Silicon Valley for a job at Sun Micro Systems while going to graduate school at Stanford. However, in less than two years, I left Sun Micro, dropped out of my master’s program and went to a startup developing reconfigurable processors. I transitioned in and out of a few startups wo

I’ve been thinking about artificial intelligence for a long time. I used to read a lot of Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke. It worked out in my favor that the big sci-fi trends in the mid 80’s/early 90’s seemed to all be centered around AI! This curiosity lead me to Duke University where I graduated with degrees in both computer science and electrical engineering with many classes in philosophy. During my undergrad years, I worked on neuromorphic circuits, which are circuits that mimic some of the behaviors that we see in biological neurons. I found it fascinating that you could characterize biolog