NVIDIA Chief Scientist and Senior Vice President of Research Bill Dally will discuss AI, innovation and the future of computing from 7 to 8 p.m. Oct. 21 at the Davidson Math and Science Center, room 110. The Nevada Engineering event, “Beyond the AI Revolution: A Conversation With NVIDIA Chief Scientist Billy Dally,” will explore how AI may transform our lives and careers, what drives breakthrough innovation and which opportunities and concerns deserve our attention. 

Reynolds School of Journalism Dean Gi Yun will moderate the discussion, which is free and open to the public. Registration is required. 

“AI increasingly is a part of the technology we use every day, and few people have had a greater impact on that transformation than Bill Dally,” Engineering Dean Tom Weller said. “Nevada Engineering is excited to welcome him to the University and provide the Wolf Pack community an opportunity to hear from one of the world’s leading computer scientists.”

Bill Dally joined NVIDIA in January 2009 as chief scientist, after spending 12 years at Stanford University, where he was chairman of the computer science department. Dally and his Stanford team developed the system architecture, network architecture, signaling, routing and synchronization technology that is found in most large parallel computers today. 

From 1986 to 2997, Dally was at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he and his team built the J-Machine and the M-Machine, experimental parallel computer systems that pioneered the separation of mechanism from programming models and demonstrated very low overhead synchronization and communication mechanisms. Dally was at California Institute of Technology (CalTech) from 1983 to 1986, where he designed the MOSSIM Simulation Engine and the Torus Routing chip, which pioneered “wormhole” routing and virtual-channel flow control. 

He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, a fellow of the IEEE and the Association for Computing Machinery. Dally has received the ACM Eckert-Mauchly Award, the IEEE Seymour Cray Award and the ACM Maurice Wilkes award. He has published over 250 papers, holds over 120 issued patents and is an author of four textbooks. He received a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from Virginia Tech, a master’s in electrical engineering from Stanford University and a Ph.D. in computer science from CalTech. He was a cofounder of Velio Communications and Stream Processors.