Looking Forward to Upcoming Themes

In this Issue The Jan./Feb. 2017 issue on cognitive architectures is guest edited by Pradip Bose and Alper Buyuktosunoglu from the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center. Recent innovations in cognitive computing systems, along with neurally inspired hardware designs, have spurred new research and development activities in machine learning, neuromorphic, and other brain-inspired computing models, as well as new architectures and accelerator designs in computer vision, speech recognition, and artificial intelligence. The proliferation of mobile computing platforms, Internet of Things devices, and cloud computing infrastructures open up exciting new opportunities for cognition. This special issue features a lot of material: an invited “keynote” article by James E. Smith, four technical articles, and an Expert Opinion department. I invite you to read the editorial by the guest editors for a more detailed introduction to this special issue. I wholeheartedly thank Pradip and Alper for having done such a great job on this special issue. This issue also features a transcript of a Computer Architecture Research Debate. You may recall that the July/ August 2016 issue featured two CARD transcripts. The current issue includes a transcript of the third debate held at the CARD Workshop at the 2015 International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA). Babak Falsafi moderated the debate with panelists Desh Singh and Bill Dally. The debate covers interesting viewpoints regarding the integration of fieldprogrammable gate arrays (FPGAs) and GPUs in the datacenter. I thank the panel members and the CARD workshop organizers, Derek Chiou, Resit Sendag, and Joshua J. Yi, for their contributions.