William Mark Severa

Principal Member of Technical Staff

Principal Member of Technical Staff

wmsever@sandia.gov

Biography

William is a mathematician and researcher specializing in deep learning, spiking neural networks, and neuromorphic computing. After receiving his Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Florida, he joined Sandia in 2015 and his research has demonstrated the practicality and effectiveness of utilizing neural network architectures in real-world scenarios, including applications in scientific computing and remote sensing.  Currently serving as a Principal Member of Technical Staff in the Cognitive and Emerging Computing Department, he brings a wealth of knowledge and experience to the group.  His research focus includes both spiking and non-spiking neural networks, highlighting versatility and a deep knowledge of these domains.  William explores the potential of neuromorphic systems viewed as event-based, massively parallel processors, with a particular focus on improving energy efficiency and enabling low-power applications.  

Education

UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA — PH.D. MATHEMATICS, AUG 2015
UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA — M.S. MATHEMATICS, DEC 2012
FLORIDA ATLANTIC UNIVERSITY — B.A. LIBERAL ARTS AND SCIENCES, MAY 2010

Publications

  1. “Research Challenges for Energy-efficient Computing in Automated Vehicles” Robert C. Aitken, Yorie Nakahira, J. Strachan, Kirk M. Bresniker, Ian Young, Zhiyong Li, L. Klebanoff, Carrie Burchard, Suhas Kumar, Matthew J. Marinella, William M. Severa, A. Talin, Craig M. Vineyard, C. Mailhiot, R. Dick, Wei Lu, Jace Mogill, Computer 56 (2023) 47 – 58.
  2. “Stochastic Neuromorphic Circuits for Solving MAXCUT.” Brad Theilman, Yipu Wang, Ojas D. Parekh, William M. Severa, J. D. Smith, J. Aimone, IEEE International Parallel and Distribution Processing Symposium (accepted). ArXiv: Vol. abs/2210.02588,2022
  3. “A review of non-cognitive applications for neuromorphic computing.” J. Aimone, Prasanna Date, Gabriel Fonseca-Guerra, Kathleen E. Hamilton, Kyle Henke, Bill Kay, G. Kenyon, Shruti R. Kulkarni, S. Mniszewski, Maryam Parsa, Sumedh R. Risbud, Catherine D. Schuman, William M. Severa, J. D. Smith, Neuromorphic Computing and Engineering: Vol. 2, 2022
  4. “Exploring SAR ATR with neural networks: going beyond accuracy.” Ryan Melzer, William M. Severa, Craig M. Vineyard, Defense + Commercial Sensing: Vol. 12096, 2022
  5. “Learning to Parameterize a Stochastic Process Using Neuromorphic Data Generation.” William M. Severa, J. D. Smith, J. Aimone, R. Lehoucq, International Conference on Neuromorphic Systems: 2022.
  6. “Neural Mini-Apps as a Tool for Neuromorphic Computing Insight.” Craig M. Vineyard, S. Cardwell, F. Chance, S. Musuvathy, Fred Rothganger, William M. Severa, John Smith, Corinne Teeter, Felix Wang, J. Aimone, Neuro Inspired Computational Elements Work- shop: 2022.
  7. “Neuromorphic scaling advantages for energy-efficient random walk computations.” J. D. Smith, A. Hill, Leah E. Reeder, B. Franke, R. Lehoucq, Ojas D. Parekh, William M. Severa, J. Aimone, Nature Electronics: 2021
  8. “Exploring characteristics of neural network architecture computation for enabling SAR ATR.” Ryan Melzer, William M. Severa, M. Plagge, Craig M. Vineyard, SPIE Defense and Commercial Sensing: Vol. 11729, pp. 1172909, 2021
  9. “Provable Advantages for Graph Algorithms in Spiking Neural Networks.” J. Aimone, Yang Ho, Ojas D. Parekh, C. Phillips, Ali Pinar, William M. Severa, Yipu Wang, ACM Symposium on Parallelism in Algorithms and Architectures: 2021
  10. “Assessing a Neuromorphic Platform for use in Scientific Stochastic Sampling.” J. Aimone, R. Lehoucq, William M. Severa, J. D. Smith, International Conference on Rebooting Computing: pp. 64-73, 2021
  11. “Evaluating complexity and resilience trade-offs in emerging memory inference ma- chines.” Christopher Bennett, Ryan Dellana, T. Xiao, B. Feinberg, S. Agarwal, S. Cardwell, Matthew J. Marinella, William M. Severa, J. Aimone, Neuro-Inspired Computational Elements: 2021
  12. “Spiking Neural Streaming Binary Arithmetic.” J. Aimone, A. Hill, William M. Severa, Craig M. Vineyard, International Conference on Rebooting Computing, pp. 79-83, 2021
  13. “Neuromorphic scaling advantages for energy-efficient random walk computation.” J. D. Smith, A. Hill, Leah Reeder, B. Franke, R. Lehoucq, Ojas D. Parekh, William M. Severa, J. Aimone, ArXiv: Vol. abs/2107.13057, 2020
  14. “Neural Network Approaches for Enabling Automatic Target Recognition.” Craig M. Vineyard, Ryan Melzer, S. Musuvathy, J. Richards, William M. Severa, John Smith, Proposed for presentation at the Workshop: Uncertainty Management and Machine Learning in Engineering Applications.: 2020.
  15. “Truly Heterogeneous HPC: Co-design to Achieve What Science Needs from HPC.” S. Cardwell, Craig M. Vineyard, William M. Severa, F. Chance, Frederick H. Rothganger, Felix Wang, S. Musuvathy, Corinne Teeter, J. Aimone, Smoky Mountains Conference, 2020
  16. “Effective Pruning of Binary Activation Neural Networks.” William M. Severa, Ryan Dellana, Craig M. Vineyard, International Conference on Neuromorphic Systems: 2020
  17. “Solving a steady-state PDE using spiking networks and neuromorphic hardware.” J. D. Smith, William M. Severa, A. Hill, Leah Reeder, B. Franke, R. Lehoucq, Ojas D. Parekh, J. Aimone, International Conference on Neuromorphic Systems: 2020
  18. “Hyperparameter Optimization in Binary Communication Networks for Neuromorphic Deployment.” Maryam Parsa, Catherine D. Schuman, Prasanna Date, Derek C. Rose, Bill Kay, J. P. Mitchell, Steven R. Young, Ryan Dellana, William M. Severa, T. Potok, K. Roy, IEEE International Joint Conference on Neural Networks: pp. 1-9, 2020
  19. “Evaluating complexity and resilience trade-offs in emerging memory inference machines.” C. Bennett, Ryan Dellana, T. Xiao, B. Feinberg, S. Agarwal, S. Cardwell, M. Marinella, William M. Severa, Brad Aimone, Neuro Inspired Computational Elements Workshop: 2020
  20. “Brief Announcement: Provable Neuromorphic Advantages for Computing Shortest Paths.” J. Aimone, Yang Ho, Ojas D. Parekh, C. Phillips, A. Pinar, William M. Severa, Yipu Wang, ACM Symposium on Parallelism in Algorithms and Architectures: 2020
  21. “Acquisition and Representation of Spatio-Temporal Signals in Polychronizing Spiking Neural Networks.” Felix Wang, William M. Severa, Fred Rothganger, Neuro Inspired Computational Elements Workshop: 2019
  22. “Building a Comprehensive Neuromorphic Platform for Remote Computation.” William M. Severa, A. Hill, Craig M. Vineyard, A. Yanguas-Gil, Ryan Dellana, Leah Reeder, Felix Wang, J. Aimone. DoD Journal of Research and Engineering, vol 2, no 2 (August 2019): 59-67
  23. “AResurgenceinNeuromorphicArchitecturesEnablingRemoteSensingComputation.” Craig M. Vineyard, William M. Severa, Matthew J. Kagie, A. Scholand, P. Hays, 33-40. 10. 1109/SpaceComp.2019.00009
  24. “Benchmarking Event-Driven Neuromorphic Architectures.” Craig M. Vineyard, Sam Green, William M. Severa, Ç. Koç, International Conference on Neuromorphic Systems: 2019
  25. “Low-Power Deep Learning Inference using the SpiNNaker Neuromorphic Platform.” Craig M. Vineyard, Ryan Dellana, J. Aimone, Fred Rothganger, William M. Severa, Neuro Inspired Computational Elements Workshop: 2019
  26. “Composing neural algorithms with Fugu.” J. Aimone, William M. Severa, Craig M. Vineyard, International Conference on Neuromorphic Systems: 2019
  27. “TrainingdeepneuralnetworksforbinarycommunicationwiththeWhetstonemethod.” William M. Severa, Craig M. Vineyard, Ryan Dellana, S. Verzi, J. Aimone, Nature Machine Intelligence: Vol. 1, pp. 86-94, (ArXiv: abs/1810.11521, 2018), 2019
  28. “The Insect Brain as a Model System for Low Power Electronics and Edge Processing Applications.” A. Yanguas-Gil, A. Mane, J. Elam, Felix Wang, William M. Severa, A. Daram, D. Kudithipudi, IEEE International Conference on Services Computing: pp. 60-66, 2019
  29. “Dynamic Programming with Spiking Neural Computing.” J. Aimone, Ojas D. Parekh, C. Phillips, A. Pinar, William M. Severa, Helen Xu, International Conference on Neuromorphic Systems: 2019
  30. “Spiking Neural Algorithms for Markov Process Random Walk.” William M. Severa, R. Lehoucq, Ojas D. Parekh, J. Aimone, IEEE International Joint Conference on Neural Networks: pp. 1-8, 2018
  31. “Non-Neural Network Applications for Spiking Neuromorphic Hardware.” J. Aimone, Kathleen E. Hamilton, S. Mniszewski, Leah Reeder, Catherine D. Schuman, William M. Severa, 3rd International Workshop on Post-Moore’s Era Supercomputer, Supercomputing (2018).
  32. “Geometric representation of the infimax S-adic family.” P. Boyland, William Severa, Fund. Math., 240 (2018), 15-50
  33. “Making BREAD: Biomimetic Strategies for Artificial Intelligence Now and in the Future.” J. Krichmar, William M. Severa, Salar M. Khan, J. Olds, Frontiers in Neuroscience: Vol. 13, 2018
  34. “Context-modulation of hippocampal dynamics and deep convolutional networks.” J. Aimone, William M. Severa, ArXiv: abs/1711.09876, 2017
  35. “A Combinatorial Model for Dentate Gyrus Sparse Coding.” William M. Severa, Ojas D. Parekh, C. James, J. Aimone, Neural Computation: Vol. 29, pp. 94-117, 2017
  36. “Neural computing for scientific computing applications: more than just machine learning.” J. Aimone, Ojas D. Parekh, William M. Severa, Neuromorphic Computing Symposium: 2017
  37. “A Spike-Timing Neuromorphic Architecture.” A. Hill, Jonathon W. Donaldson, Fred Rothganger, Craig M. Vineyard, D. Follett, P. Follett, Michael R. Smith, S. Verzi, William M. Severa, Felix Wang, J. Aimone, J. Naegle, C. James, International Conference on Rebooting Computing: pp. 1-8, 2017
  38. “Spiking network algorithms for scientific computing.” William M. Severa, Ojas D. Parekh, Kristofor D. Carlson, C. James, J. Aimone, International Conference on Rebooting Computing: pp. 1-8, 2016
  39. “Neurogenesis deep learning: Extending deep networks to accommodate new classes.” T. Draelos, N. Miner, Christopher C. Lamb, Jonathan A. Cox, Craig M. Vineyard, Kristofor D. Carlson, William M. Severa, C. James, J. Aimone, IEEE International Joint Conference on Neural Network: pp. 526-533, 2016
  40. “Avoiding abelian squares in partial words.” F. Blanchet-Sadri, Jane I. Kim, Robert Mercas, William Severa, S. Simmons, D. Xu, Journal of combinatorial theory. Series A: Vol. 119, pp. 257-270, 2012
  41. “Abelian Square-Free Partial Words.” F. Blanchet-Sadri, Jane I. Kim, Robert Mercas, William Severa, S. Simmons, Language and Automata Theory and Applications: pp. 94-105, 2010

Patents and Software

Issued Patents
11,281,964: DEVICES AND METHODS FOR INCREASING THE SPEED AND EFFICIENCY AT WHICH
A COMPUTER IS CAPABLE OF MODELING A PLURALITY OF RANDOM WALKERS USING A PARTICLE METHOD—James Aimone, Richard Lehoucq, Ojas Parekh, William Severa
11,409,922: DEVICES AND METHODS FOR INCREASING THE SPEED AND EFFICIENCY AT WHICH
A COMPUTER IS CAPABLE OF MODELING A PLURALITY OF RANDOM WALKERS USING A
DENSITY METHOD—James Aimone, Richard Lehoucq, Ojas Parekh, William Severa
11,501,432: SPIKING RETINA MICROSCOPE—Suma Cardwell, William Severa, John Smith

Related Software

Fugu https://github.com/sandialabs/Fugu

Whetstone https://github.com/sandialabs/Whetstone

Heat Equation Neural Simulation https://github.com/sandialabs/HeatEquationNeuralSimulation