Camron Blackburn

camron.blackburn [at] cba.mit.edu

I am a PhD candidate jointly advised by Prof. Neil Gershenfeld in the MIT Center for Bits and Atoms and Prof. Karl Berggren in the Quantum Nanostructures and Nanofabrication group in the RLE at MIT. My PhD research focuses on ultra-low power computing systems built from superconducting electronic devices. My work spans the full stack of computing system development, from low-level superconducting device physics to high-level architecture analysis. I completed my masters degree in September 2021, with a thesis on asynchronous superconducting digital logic that you can check out here.

Before moving to Cambridge, I lived in NYC working at a data science / software engineer for Veritone, where I built hierarchical deep learning model for various AI tasks - mostly applications in computer vision. And prior to that, I received a bachelors in Physics with high honors from NYU while building an optical tractor beam in Professor David Grier's soft matter research group.

Things I get most excited to talk about (in no particular order):

• reconfigurable hardware accelerators for application specific computing tasks
• early computer history - specifically data storage methods (more specifically, EDVAC delay lines built from mercury tubes)
• science and technology funding pipelines - how they've impacted what research gets done and how to shape them for the future
• Maxwell's demon > Landauer's limit > Szilard engine thought experiment > reversible computing (both logically and thermodynamically)
• asynchronous automata computing theory
• geoCities era of the World Wide Web
• superconducting device logic families (and their tradeoffs)