From climbing mountains in the annual California Death Ride to creating a low-cost, open-source fan n the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, NVIDIA’s Chief Scientist Bill Daly was no stranger to accomplishing near-impossible feats.
On Friday, he reached another rare milestone: he was hired Silicon Valley Engineering Council Hall of Fame.
The purpose of the council, a coalition of engineering societies including the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, SAE International, and the Computing Association, is to promote engineering programs and advance society through science.
Since 1990, the Hall of Fame has honored engineers who have achieved significant professional achievements in service to their profession and society at large.
Previous invitees include industry luminaries such as Intel founders Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore, former Stanford University president and MIPS founder John Hennessy, and distinguished Google engineer and UC Berkeley professor emeritus David Patterson.
“Industry Leader” recognition
In accepting the honor, Daly said, “I am honored to be inducted into the Silicon Valley Hall of Fame. The work for which I am recognized is part of a large team. Many faculty and students have been involved in streaming research at Stanford, and a very large team at NVIDIA has been involved in translating that research to GPU computing. It’s a really exciting time to be a computer engineer.”
“The future is bright with much more demanding applications waiting to be accelerated by the principles of streaming and accelerated computing.”
His induction began with a video with colleagues and friends that spanned his career at Caltech, MIT, Stanford and NVIDIA.
In the video, NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang describes Daley as an “extraordinary scientist, engineer, leader, and amazing human being.”
Fei-Fei Li, professor of computer science at Stanford and co-director of the Stanford Institute for Human Artificial Intelligence, praised Daly’s journey “from a world-class academic scientist and researcher to an industry leader” who is leading one of the “biggest digital revolutions of our time in terms of AI — both software and hardware.”
After the video tribute, Fred Bares, chairman of the Hall of Fame committee and professor of mechanical engineering at San Jose State University, took the stage. He said of Daly, “This year’s inductee has made significant contributions not only to his profession, but to Silicon Valley and beyond.”
Supporting the GPU revolution
As the head of Fr NVIDIA research For nearly 15 years, Delly has built a team of more than 300 scientists around the world covering a wide range of topics, including artificial intelligence, graphics, modeling, computer vision, self-driving cars and robotics.
Before NVIDIA, Dalli advanced cutting-edge technology at some of the world’s leading academic institutions. His development of stream processing at Stanford University led directly to GPU computing, and his contributions are responsible for most of the technologies used in high-performance computing networks today.