Natesh Ganesh

University of Massachusetts Amherst | UMass Amherst · Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

In this short paper, we will introduce a simple model for quantifying philosophical vagueness. There is growing interest in this endeavor to quantify vague concepts of consciousness, agency, etc. We will then discuss some of the implications of this model including the conditions under which the quantification of `nifty' leads to pan-nifty-ism. Und...

The 'unfolding argument' was presented by Doerig et.al. [1] as an argument to show that causal structure theories (CST) like IIT are either falsified or outside the realm of science. In their recent paper [2],[3], the authors mathematically formalized the process of generating observable data from experiments and using that data to generate inferen...

In this paper, we take a brief look at the advantages and disadvantages of dominant frameworks in consciousness studies -- functionalist and causal structure theories, and use it to motivate a new non-equilibrium thermodynamic framework of consciousness. The main hypothesis in this paper will be two thermodynamic conditions obtained from the non-eq...

As the compute demands for machine learning and artificial intelligence applications continue to grow, co-design techniques and neuromorphic hardware have been touted as potential solutions. New emerging devices like memristors, atomic switches, etc have shown tremendous potential to replace CMOS-based circuits but have been hindered by multiple ch...

The hardware and software foundations laid in the first half of the 20th Century enabled the computing technologies that have transformed the world, but these foundations are now under siege. The current computing paradigm, which is the foundation of much of the current standards of living that we now enjoy, faces fundamental limitations that are e...

At roughly kT energy dissipation per operation, the thermodynamic energy efficiency “limits” of Moore's Law were unimaginably far off in the 1960s. However, current computers operate at only 100–10,000 times this limit, forming an argument that historical rates of efficiency scaling must soon slow. This paper reviews the justification for the ∼kT p...

Irreversibility and dissipation in finite-state automata (FSA) are considered from a physical-information-theoretic perspective. A quantitative measure for the computational irreversibility of finite automata is introduced, and a fundamental lower bound on the average energy dissipated per state transition is obtained and expressed in terms of FSA...

A hierarchical methodology for the determination of fundamental lower bounds on energy dissipation in nanoprocessors is described. The methodology aims to bridge computational description of nanoprocessors at the instruction-set-architecture level to their physical description at the level of dynamical laws and entropic inequalities. The ultimate o...

Performance-power-area tradeoffs for on-chip error correction with unreliable decoders are considered from a physical-information-theoretic perspective. Fundamental upper bounds on information throughput under decoding power and heat removal constraints are obtained as a function of decoder efficacy for (n, k) linear block codes. Evaluation of thes...

A hierarchical methodology for the determination of fundamental lower bounds on energy dissipation in nanoprocessors is described. The methodology aims to bridge computational description of nanoprocessors at the instruction-set-architecture level to their physical description at the level of dynamical laws and entropic inequalities. The ultimate o...