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      • Brandon Toushan
      • Carter Burleson
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      • Elitsa Papazova
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      • Nitin Naik
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      • Varunram Ganesh
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      • Sravya Vishnubhatla
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    • Chantal Miklosi
    • Malekeh Amini
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Picture
  • B.S., M.S. MIT Mechanical Engineering
  • M.S., Ph.D. Caltech, Computer Science, minor in Computation and Neural Systems
  • Roles at NVIDIA included Chief Scientist, VP of Architecture, VP of Research, Co-VP of Software
  • Elected to National Academy of Engineering
  • Computer industry veteran, having built products at Raster Technologies, Apollo Computer, Hewlett Packard, Crystal Dynamics, and NVIDIA

David Kirk, Venture Partner at DigitalDx, was a born engineer, always inventing and building things.  After Mechanical Engineering degrees at MIT, David worked on CAD and workstations, and this led him to making pictures with computers.  David specialized in computer graphics, VLSI, and analog computing at Caltech.  There was a strong synergy with these topics and neural networks, Analog VLSI, and neurobiology.
 

David drove graphics technology at video game developer Crystal Dynamics.  This led to NVIDIA, building graphics chips for 3D graphics for PCs.  As Chief Scientist and VP of Architecture, David led architecture and technology development for a series of products.  In a few short years, single chip 3D PC graphics accelerators surpassed the performance of million dollar graphics systems built by SGI and others.  During the course of this innovation, David was inventor or co-inventor of nearly 100 patents.  Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) rapidly became the most powerful and versatile computing devices on the planet.  As GPUs became more programmable, they presented a programming challenge; modern computer science had not contemplated devices with hundreds of processors and thousands of threads.  The task of driving GPU adoption shifted from creating computer graphics to teaching parallel programming.
 
David founded the research division of NVIDIA, focusing on graphics architecture and algorithms, rendering applications and algorithms, and programming models.
 
David turned his attention to teaching parallel programming in computer science.  David authored the hugely popular parallel programming textbook “Programming Massively Parallel Processors”.  Now in its 3rd edition, this textbook sold 10s of 1000s of copies and was translated into more than 10 languages.
 
After the “AI Winter”, the GPU Big Bang showed that GPUs were an effective tool for making artificial neural networks practical on a large scale, in real world applications.  It turns out that the massively parallel threaded architecture of GPUs is ideal for AI training and inference, more so even than many special purpose architectures.  David continued his efforts of parallel programming education, now with a focus on AI.  David continues to stay involved with education, teaching intensive master class programming summer school events, and remaining an Adjunct Professor at UIUC’s ECE department.
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  • Home
  • Intro
    • MISSION HISTORY
  • Team
    • TEAM HISTORY >
      • Ted Driscoll
      • Michele Colucci
      • Eric Weiss
      • David Kirk
      • Maureen Downey
      • Arthur Henderson
      • Gianna Conci Orozco
      • L Jasmine Kim
      • Robert Weigle
      • Laura Yecies
      • Steve Goldenberg
      • Vivian Lu
    • Fellows >
      • Apply for Fellowship
      • Ethan Gauvin
      • Caroline Gezon
      • Ananya Sheth
      • Michelle Volz
      • Adam Aguilera
      • Joanna Zhu
      • Andy Chen
      • Andrew Hicks
      • Shreya Dwarakanath
      • Sam Lambert
      • Charlton Hook
      • Sylvia Bouloutas
      • Alexandra Davis
      • Alexander Behrens
      • Melania Antoszko
      • Michael Solotke
      • Arpan Soparkar
      • Changhao Wei
      • Irene Manousiouthakis
      • Vivek Maheshwari
      • Isha Godara
      • Eddie Chan
      • Joseph Kemp
      • Michael Tellini
      • Dariush Sarrafzadeh
      • Dev Sharma
      • Alan Quigley
      • Tristan Zhang
      • Austin Hwang
      • Ivan Fang
      • Leyton Ho
      • Saumya Choudhary
      • Srinidhi Sankar
      • Yashaswi Kumar
      • Yifu Wu
      • Ajay Sharma
      • Amber Bowie
      • Anthony Obi Jr
      • Bob Chien
      • Brandon Toushan
      • Carter Burleson
      • Chia-Fen Hsieh
      • Elitsa Papazova
      • Emily Stotland
      • Eric Li
      • Kristina Schlegel
      • Minshan Chen
      • Nitin Naik
      • Teryn Isabel Mitchell
      • Varunram Ganesh
      • YiChiang Chan
      • Yvette Lu
      • Anran Li
      • Sneha Kasuganti
      • Mark Kleyner
      • Omair Bin Haider
      • Sravya Vishnubhatla
  • ADVISORS
    • Russ Altman
    • Saul A. Fox
    • Deborah DiSanzo
    • Carl Wieman
    • Girish Narayan
    • Ferid Murad
    • Rebecca Macieira-Kaufmann
  • Impact
    • Chantal Miklosi
    • Malekeh Amini
    • Melanie Mahtani
    • Marie-Claude Marchand
    • Minnie Sarwal
    • Claudia Chevrefils
    • Lucy Lu
  • FOCUS
  • Portfolios
    • Nephrosant
    • Prime Genomics
    • Trayt