This week, I interviewed Mattia Vezzoli from Italy. He is a PhD student in Electrical Engineering.
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Mattia was born in Desenzano del Garda and did his engineering studies at Universita degli studi di Brescia for his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees. While he was writing his thesis during his Master’s, he was offered an internship opportunity at Yale and he spent six months working as a research assistant. After returning to Italy and working for two years there, Mattia decided to come back to Yale and continue his scientific career as a PhD student.
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For research, when Mattia just started at Yale, he was focused on silicon photonics and was working on scaling laser technology into integrated devices. During the process, he was able to learn about the fundamental knowledge in the field. He recently started a new project where he is designing chips and he is working on deep learning accelerators where neural networks can run fast and efficiently. These chips can be integrated in energy sensible applications, such as robots and self-driving cars, replacing bulky and inefficient GPUs and CPUs.
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During his daily life, Mattia enjoys working out and making art. In his opinion, art gives people freedom to express themselves - there is no “correct” or “incorrect” way of painting, which can be a bit different from the engineering work he does. The contrast motivates him to find various ways to combine engineering and art together. He will be the teaching assistant of the class Digital Systems this semester, where students will have the opportunities to work on engineering or art projects using integrated micro processors like Arduino. These devices can give life to simple systems or artworks, which sounds very fascinating to me!
#humansofoiss
