ECE Seminar - From Trade-offs to Talk: Enabling Speech-Driven Healthcare with LLMs
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Abstract. Large language models (LLMs) show immense promise, but deploying them on resource-limited and privacy-sensitive settings such as healthcare poses major challenges. Scaling laws assume unlimited compute, yet edge devices require trade-offs in model size, compression, personalization, and training efficiency. At the same time, cloud-hosted LLMs risk Protected Health Information (PHI), and text interfaces can exclude users like children or older adults. Voice-enabled, edge-based LLMs offer a path forward, though errors from automatic speech recognition (ASR) often degrade performance, especially for users with language impairments. This talk provides practical guidelines for efficient and inclusive edge deployment, explores new hardware like Compute-in-Memory (CiM), and introduces evaluation frameworks for robust, speech-enabled healthcare AI.
Dr. Yiyu Shi is currently a professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Notre Dame, the site director of National Science Foundation I/UCRC Alternative and Sustainable Intelligent Computing, and the director of the Sustainable Computing Lab (SCL). He is also a visiting scientist at Boston Children’s Hospital, the primary pediatric program of Harvard Medical School. He received his B.S. in Electronic Engineering from Tsinghua University, Beijing, China in 2005, the M.S and Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2007 and 2009 respectively. His current research interests focus on hardware intelligence and biomedical applications. In recognition of his research, more than a dozen of his papers have been nominated for or awarded as the best paper in top journals and conferences, including the 2023 IEEE/ACM William J. McCalla ICCAD Best Paper Award, 2021 IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design Donald O Pederson Best Paper Award. He is also the recipient of Facebook Research Award, IBM Invention Achievement Award, NSF CAREER Award, IEEE Region 5 Outstanding Individual Achievement Award, IEEE Computer Society Mid-Career Research Achievement Award, among others. He has served on the technical program committee of many international conferences. He is the deputy editor-in-chief of IEEE VLSI CAS Newsletter, and an associate editor of various IEEE and ACM journals. He is an IEEE CEDA distinguished lecturer and an ACM distinguished speaker.