David Boland

Dr. David Boland is a Senior Lecturer at the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Sydney. He holds an MEng and PhD from Imperial College London. His research focuses on energy-efficient hardware acceleration, particularly using FPGAs and application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs), to optimize computational efficiency in domains like machine learning and optical communications. He has contributed to projects involving custom hardware accelerators, federated learning for edge computing, and real-time signal processing.

Education:

• MEng, Imperial College London, 2007
• PhD, Imperial College London, 2012

Research Interests: Dr. Boland’s work emphasizes reducing computational overhead through customized hardware solutions. He explores techniques for minimizing unnecessary computations while maintaining accuracy, leveraging FPGA-based designs for parallelism and energy efficiency. Key areas include:

• Hardware acceleration for machine learning
• FPGA optimization for neural networks
• Energy-efficient algorithms for edge computing
• Online arithmetic and latency-accuracy trade-offs

Grants & Collaborations:

• 2022: On-Board Federated Learning in Orbital Edge Computing (NSW Department of Industry)
• 2017: Fast Automated Anomaly Detection in Communication Networks (Defence Science & Technology Group)

Affiliations: Member of the Net Zero Institute, collaborating on sustainable computing solutions.