Professor Alex Yakovlev

Dr. Alex Yakovlev is a Professor of Computer System Design at Newcastle University and a co-founder of Literal Labs. Born on 9th April 1956 in Leningrad, he was schooled at High School No. 38, an institution of local repute for its teaching of mathematics and physics. In his fifth year of undergraduate study at the Leningrad Electrotechnical Institute, he won the all-Leningrad Olympiad in Computer Science and was sent as a delegate to the congress of Olympiad winners in Moscow in 1979. He was awarded his Diplom-Ingenieur with distinction, and progressed to doctoral study at the same institution.

Yakovlev was initially mentored by Associate Professor Leonid Rosenblum, whose influence on his early development was profound, and included the introduction to his doctoral supervisor, Professor Victor Varshavsky. Varshavsky’s own mentor was Mikhail Tsetlin, upon whose mathematical work the Tsetlin Machine, the basis of Literal Labs’ Logic-Based Networks, is derived. Behind Tsetlin stood Israel Gelfand, and behind Gelfand, Andrey Kolmogorov: four generations of Russian mathematical lineage, spanning barely thirty years from eldest to youngest, yet accounting for some of the most formidable minds of the twentieth century.

Yakovlev defended his PhD dissertation in 1982, the thesis treating the design and implementation of asynchronous communication protocols in systems interface. He joined the faculty of the Leningrad Electrotechnical Institute as an assistant professor, before undertaking post-doctoral research in 1984 at the Computing Laboratory of the University of Newcastle upon Tyne. He returned to Leningrad, was promoted to associate professor and deputy head of department in 1988, and in October 1990 emigrated from the Soviet Union. He took a senior lectureship at the University of Glamorgan before, in 1991, securing a post at Newcastle, where he has remained, working closely with Professor David Kinniment on numerous projects in asynchronous systems design.

In 2000, he was appointed Head of the Microsystems Research Group and founded the Asynchronous Systems Laboratory, which grew to fifteen researchers and maintained close working relationships with Intel, BAe Dynamics, Dialog Semiconductor, Atmel, and Nordic Semiconductor, amongst others. He co-invented Signal Transition Graphs, a formal model for asynchronous logic design adopted in academic and industrial practice. His “Petrify team”, formed with Jordi Cortadella, Michael Kishinevsky, Alex Kondratyev, and Luciano Lavagno, was supported by Intel and by joint EPSRC projects with the University of Bristol and King’s College London, and contributed to the formation of an asynchronous design team at Intel Corporation that produced the asynchronous instruction decoder RAPPID between 1996 and 1999. His subsequent joint EPSRC projects with the University of Manchester laid the foundation to developing “Workcraft”, a post-Petrify asynchronous design toolset widely used in industry, particularly for building reliable, fast and power-efficient analog-mixed signal integrated circuits.

Yakovlev has chaired and co-chaired numerous editions of the ASYNC Symposium, co-founded and chaired the Steering Committee of the Application of Concurrency to System Design conference from 2001 to 2018, and together with Professor Steve Furber, co-founded the UK Asynchronous Forum, which he led from 1997 to 2012. He has been invited to lecture at institutions across Europe, including Helsinki, Leuven, Augsburg, and Cottbus, as well as the research laboratories of Hewlett-Packard and Analog Devices. In 2006, he submitted a DSc thesis to Newcastle University, “Theory and Practice of Using Models of Concurrency in Hardware Design,” a collected account of his accumulated work to that point.

His publication record runs to over 700 research papers and eight monographs; seventeen of his conference papers have received best paper awards. He holds six patents covering asynchronous sequential registers, voltage-sensing apparatus, and methods for selecting relative timing constraints in asynchronous circuits, and has supervised more than seventy PhD students to completion.

His current work concerns electromagnetic computing and circuit design for machine learning based on Tsetlin automata, the intellectual tradition of his doctoral formation applied to the problem of efficient and explainable artificial intelligence. This work provides the scientific foundation for his role as co-founder of Literal Labs.

Yakovlev was appointed a Dream Fellow of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council in 2012–13, elected a Fellow of the Institution of Engineering and Technology in 2015, a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 2016, and a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering in 2017. In 2018, he received the IET Achievement Medal for his contributions to electronic engineering. He has held Chartered Engineer status since 2015.