J. Kuper’s Presentation on Modern Developments in ICT

January 20, 2 p.m., Jan Kuper, a Dutch scientist, professor emeritus of the University of Enschede in the Netherlands and founder of the QBayLogic company, will hold a lecture on the latest developments in ICT. The lecture will take place in the Small Hall of Vytautas Magnus University (S. Daukanto st. 28).

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The presentation will give a first introduction in FPGAs, their usage, and ways how to program them.

„Nowadays, computer applications become bigger and bigger, think of artificial intelligence, big data, natural language processing, satellite systems, security. These applications are so big and heavy that normal computers cannot handle them anymore. Existing solutions such as super computers or multicore systems (of 100.000 processors or more) are enormously expensive (millions of euros) and require a huge amount of energy. These solutions are hardly affordable and in any case not sustainable.

FPGAs are a new type of computer that have a lot of advantages: they calculate much faster than normal computers, they are both much cheaper, and they require much less energy. They calculate by doing the computation not in software, but directly in the hardware“, – say J.Kuper.

In this talk we will shortly give an intuitive and elementary introduction to FPGA’s, and give a visual impression of the difference with a normal computer processor to show the advantages of an FPGA. Because of the fundamental character of this difference, a major challenge of FPGAs is their programmability. We will argue that mainstream programming languages are not suitable to program an FPGA, and we will present a different perspective on programming that is far more suitable for FPGA’s.

Because of this situation FPGA’s are still fairly unknown, and despite their advantages their usage in practice is still limited — both in industry as well as in education. Companies that do exploit FPGA’s are mostly the big tech companies, and universities that include FPGA’s in their curriculum are still few. There are huge chances for those who tackle this challenge.

Jan Kuper completed his mathematics studies in 1985 with honours. He worked as lecturer and researcher at different universities in the Netherlands, where he got his PhD in 1994 on the foundations of mathematics and computer science. His main fields of interest are logic and mathematical programming languages. In 2007 he started research on an alternative approach to FPGA programming (called Clash). Based on this research he founded in 2026 the company QBayLogic (together with one of his PhD students Christiaan Baaij). In 2022 he retired from QBayLogic, which now is a flourishing company with some 12 employees.