Bitstream Computing Hackathon at UW-Madison

Welcome to BCH@UW!

The hackathon is now live. You can work through the materials off line, on your own schedule. Please join the mailing list to ask any questions! Submissions are due in two weeks (don't be afraid to ask for an extension if you need one).

Watch the Introduction video or browse the PPTX slides at your convenience.

This hackathon will give you a chance to learn about ultra low-power neural networks, how they are designed, how they are programmed or trained, and how they are used to process sensory data from the real world.

When you participate, you will learn:

• a new programming language (Julia)

• about low-cost, ultra-low computing using Bitstreams as a data type

• how to train a powerful neural network called MobileNet

• how to prune/tune/quantize this network to make it energy efficient

The BCH@UW Hackathon kicks off on Sun 11/12/2023 at 1pm in EH2261. In the meantime, you can work through the tutorials on this website to get started with the tools and optimization flows.

Participation rules

Goal: Prune a pre-trained MobileNetv1 model to optimize for energy efficiency without compromising the accuracy.

Your entry will be evaluated on three categories:

• Accuracy: how well can your model classify input images?

• Area: how big is the hardware circuit implementation of your model?

• Energy: how energy efficient is your hardware?

Follow the instructions in the submission guide to evaluate your result.

Information and suppport

Join the mailing list for updates/questions/support:

• Send a blank email to bitstream-hackathon+subscribe@googlegroups.com

• Or navigate to https://groups.google.com/u/1/g/bitstream-hackathon and select "Join"

NOTE: You need a gmail/google account to join the mailing list. You can always create one with your existing email and delete it once you are done with it by following the instructions found here: https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/27441

Hackathon flyer

🚧 Site under construction 🚧