Kurt Keutzer

Biography

Kurt Keutzer, PhD, serves as a Research Mentor at ICSI. He is a Professor in the BAIR Lab of the Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science UC Berkeley, where he is also a member of the Berkeley AI Research (BAIR) Lab and Co-Director of the Berkeley Deep Drive Research Consortium. He is also co-founder at Narada, Nexusflow, SigIQ.ai and an active angel investor and advisor. 

Dr. Keutzer’s research has covered all aspects of making deep learning efficient, from neural net models to complex GenAI systems. His “Squeeze” family of deep neural nets helped to pioneer deep learning for mobile and IoT applications, and his research collaborations also enabled scaling the training of neural nets to thousands of nodes. His current research focuses on making Large Language Models and Agents performant and efficient.  His earlier research in electronic design automation was recognized at the 50^th Design Automation Conference where he was noted as a Top 10 most-cited author, author of a Top 10 cited paper, and one of only three people to win four Best Paper Awards in the fifty-year history of that conference. The 60^th Design Automation Conference honored one of his papers as “The Most Influential Paper of the 1980’s.” He has co-authored six books and over 300 refereed technical papers. 

Dr. Keutzer’s entrepreneurial career began when he left Bell Labs Research for a startup, Synopsys, where he became a SVP and Chief Technology Officer. After joining the faculty of UC Berkeley in 1997, he became an active angel investor and advisor. He co-founded DeepScale, which was acquired by Tesla in 2019, and recently co-founded several companies exploring different aspects of GenAI, including Narada.ai, Nexusflow.ai, and SigIQ.ai. He received his PhD in computer science from Indiana University Bloomington and his BS in mathematics from Maharishi International University. 

Publications

Selected Honors & Awards

• IEEE Life Fellow

ICSI Activity