We propose a novel approach to reduce the computational cost of evaluation of convolutional neural networks, a factor that has hindered their deployment in lowpower devices such as mobile phones. Inspired by the loop perforation technique from source code optimization, we speed up the bottleneck convolutional layers by skipping their evaluation in some of the spatial positions. We propose and analyze several strategies of choosing these positions. We demonstrate that perforation can accelerate modern convolutional networks such as AlexNet and VGG-16 by a factor of 2 - 4 . Additionally, we show that perforation is complementary to the recently proposed acceleration method of Zhang et al. [28].

We propose a novel approach to reduce the computational cost of evaluation of convolutional neural networks, a factor that has hindered their deployment in lowpower devices such as mobile phones. Inspired by the loop perforation technique from source code optimization, we speed up the bottleneck convolutional layers by skipping their evaluation in some of the spatial positions. We propose and analyze several strategies of choosing these positions. We demonstrate that perforation can accelerate modern convolutional networks such as AlexNet and VGG-16 by a factor of 2 - 4 . Additionally, we show that perforation is complementary to the recently proposed acceleration method of Zhang et al. [28].

Approximate computing is a computation domain which can be used to trade time and energy with quality and therefore is useful in embedded systems. Energy is the prime resource in battery-driven embedded systems, like robots. Approximate computing can be used as a technique to generate approximate version of the control functionalities of a robot, enabling it to ration energy for computation at the cost of degraded quality. Usually, the programmer of the function specifies the extent of degradation that is safe for the overall safety of the system. However, in a collaborative environment, where several sub-systems co-exist and some of the functionality of each of them have been approximated, the safety of the overall system may be compromised. In this paper, we consider multiple identical robots operate in a warehouse, and the path planning function of the robot is approximated. Although the planned paths are safe for individual robots (i.e. they do not collide with the racks), we show that this leads to a collision among the robots. So, a controlled approximation needs to be carried out in such situations to harness the full power of this new paradigm if it needs to be a mainstream paradigm in future.

We propose a novel approach to reduce the computational cost of evaluation of convolutional neural networks, a factor that has hindered their deployment in lowpower devicessuch as mobile phones. Inspired by the loop perforation technique from source code optimization, we speed up the bottleneck convolutional layers by skipping their evaluation in some of the spatial positions. We propose and analyze several strategies of choosing these positions. We demonstrate that perforation can accelerate modern convolutional networks such as AlexNet and VGG-16 by a factor of 2 - 4 . Additionally, we show that perforation is complementary to the recently proposed acceleration method of Zhang et al. [28].