Manuel Ujaldon is full professor of computer architecture at the University of Malaga (Spain). His main research interests are high-performance and low-power GPGPU computing for image processing, biomedical applications and evolutionary computation. Prof. Ujaldon was a predoctoral and postdoctoral researcher at the Computer Science Dept. of the University of Maryland, visiting researcher at Biomedical Informatics Dept. of the Ohio State University (USA, 2003-08) and conjoint senior lecturer at the University of Newcastle (Australia, 2012-15).
He has published 8 books on computer architecture and around 100 papers in international peer-reviewed journals and conferences. Manuel was awarded CUDA Fellow by Nvidia in 2012, having taught since then more than 150 activities related to GPU computing in 23 countries, including more than 70 invited talks and tutorials in ACM/IEEE conferences.
How did you first hear about the NVIDIA Deep Learning Institute (DLI)?
As part of the CUDA Fellow group selected by NVIDIA in 2012, I was already engaged as an NVIDIA instructor for several years before DLI was created.
How does DLI contribute to your career in academia?
I find the role of DLI Ambassador to be very rewarding. I have been invited to teach in prominent universities and talk at prestigious conferences around the world which has enabled me to engage with excellent students and colleagues of all backgrounds. For a cosmopolitan and enthusiastic instructor like me, it exposes me to diverse cultures and communities, permitting me to discover fascinating countries and expand my teaching skills in many ways. Every DLI workshop that I organize is different, challenging and refreshing my professional career. This is a job that is hard to get tired of!
Tell us about the DLI workshops you have delivered outside of Spain.
I have had many opportunities to teach abroad as an ambassador, mainly because of my reputation as an experienced NVIDIA instructor. Since 2012, I’ve taught over 100 CUDA workshops and tutorials in ACM/IEEE conferences worldwide. Colleagues continue to invite me to participate in these activities since accelerated computing has become such a hot topic in the world of HPC. With DLI, we have much better infrastructure to run tutorials and labs, which make the workshops much more effective for our students. The University of Malaga has a long tradition of having a proactive student exchange program. Some of these programs include exchanging teaching experiences. From this, I have been very fortunate to be able to visit prominent universities in Africa and one in Asia over the last couple of years:
- Namibia University of Science and Technology (Namibia - October, 2021).
- Durban University of Technology (South Africa - July, 2022).
- University of Cape Town (#1 University in Africa - August, 2022).
- University of Kathmandu (Nepal - November, 2021).
In all these experiences, I’ve found students to be fascinated by the topics, receptive to the training and excited to receive NVIDIA Certificates of competency by an internationally experienced instructor. Overall, people were very grateful with my efforts and the hospitality was outstanding during my travels, enabling me to accumulate personal experiences like no other journey has done.
Is there anything else you would like to share about your experience with DLI?
I would like to emphasize the utility of teaching kits as a time-saving tool for preparing classes, optimizing the teaching effort and maximizing engagement from students, who look at Nvidia as the reliable source for preparing them to face the challenge of being hired in high-tech companies. Cloud services in AWS are also a fantastic resource for student to execute their first codes right away, without suffering from installing hardware and setting up software, drivers, middleware, libraries, etc.