Inexact (Approximate) computing is an attractive paradigm for digital processing. Inexact computing is particularly interesting for computer arithmetic designs. This project deals with the analysis and design of two new approximate 4-2 compressors for utilization in a multiplier. These designs rely on different features of compression, such that imprecision in computation can make up for circui...

h IT WAS IN the early 1990s when I first came in contact with the IEEE Design & Test magazine (then it still had BComputer[ in its name). At that time we contributed to a special issue on what then appeared to be a promising emerging field. And indeed, as we realized years later, IEEE D&T was the right place to publish these new ideas. The special issue with all its contributions was instrument...

ROBERT J. ERHARDT: Approximate Bayesian Computing for Spatial Extremes. (Under the direction of Richard L. Smith.) Statistical analysis of max-stable processes used to model spatial extremes has been limited by the difficulty in calculating the joint likelihood function. This precludes all standard likelihood-based approaches, including Bayesian approaches. Here we present a Bayesian approach t...

Here we introduce two new notions of approximate matching with application in computer assisted music analysis. We present algorithms for each notion of approximation: for approximate string matching and for computing approximate squares.

This paper is about computing constrained approximate Nash equilibria in polymatrix games, which are succinctly represented manyplayer games defined by an interaction graph between the players. In a recent breakthrough, Rubinstein showed that there exists a small constant ǫ, such that it is PPAD-complete to find an (unconstrained) ǫ-Nash equilibrium of a polymatrix game. In the first part of th...

Imperfect Moore’s law scaling has led to recent trends that consider systems that generate incorrect outputs. The emergent field of approximate computing considers deliberate, but controlled, relaxation of correctness for better performance, energy or reliability. While the fast growing popularity of the field indicates the general acceptance, even eagerness, for the idea, there are many hurdle...

Approximate computing is an emerging area for trading off the accuracy of an application for improved performance, lower energy costs, and tolerance to unreliable hardware. However, care has to be taken to ensure that the approximations do not cause significant divergence from the reference implementation. Previous research has proposed various metrics to guarantee several relaxed notions of sa...

We present a new, distributed method to compute approximate Nash equilibria in bimatrix games. In contrast to previous approaches that analyze the two payoff matrices at the same time (for example, by solving a single LP that combines the two players payoffs), our algorithm first solves two independent LPs, each of which is derived from one of the two payoff matrices, and then compute approxima...

Computing has entered the era of approximation, in which hardware and software generate and reason about estimates. Navigation applications turn maps and location estimates from hardware GPS sensors into driving directions; speech recognition turns an analog signal into a likely sentence; search turns queries into information; network protocols deliver unreliable messages; and recent advances p...

The algorithms for computing a shortest path on a polyhedral surface are slow, complicated, and numerically unstable. We have developed and implemented a robust and efficient algorithm for computing approximate shortest paths on a convex polyhedral surface. Given a convex polyhedral surface P in R3, two points s, t ∈ P , and a parameter ε > 0, it computes a path between s and t on P whose lengt...