Abu Sebastian

Title

Distinguished Scientist & Manager, AI Compute Frontiers
Abu Sebastian

Bio

Follow @abuseb at Bluesky Follow @abuseb at Linkedin

Email: ase[AT]zurich[dot]ibm[dot]com

SHORT BIOGRAPHY:

Abu Sebastian is a Distinguished Research Scientist at IBM Research – Zurich, where he leads the AI Compute Frontiers group in Rüschlikon, Switzerland. Originally from Kerala, India, he earned his B.E. (Hons.) in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from BITS Pilani, India, followed by M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering (with a minor in Mathematics) from Iowa State University.

Dr. Sebastian has authored over 200 peer-reviewed publications and holds more than 100 U.S. patents. For his pioneering contributions to micro- and nanoscale mechatronic systems, he was honored with the IEEE Control Systems Technology Award in 2009 and the IFAC Mechatronic Systems Young Researcher Award in 2013. His groundbreaking research in exploratory memory technologies and emerging computing paradigms has also earned him three prestigious European Research Council (ERC) grants: the Consolidator Grant (2015), the Proof-of-Concept Grant (2020), and the Advanced Grant (2025).

At IBM, he was recognized as a Master Inventor and appointed Principal Research Staff Member in 2018, later becoming a Distinguished Research Staff Member in 2020. In 2019, he received the Ovshinsky Lectureship Award for his groundbreaking contributions to phase-change materials for cognitive computing. More recently, in 2023, he was honored with the Prof. L. K. Maheshwari Foundation Distinguished Alumnus Award from BITS Pilani and was appointed Visiting Professor in Materials at the University of Oxford. Dr. Sebastian has served on the technical program committees of leading conferences including IEDM, AICAS, NVMTS, and E\PCOS, and has been an editor or guest editor for journals such as Mechatronics, APL Materials, Applied Physics Letters, and IEEE Design and Test. He is a Fellow of the IEEE.

SELECTED EXTERNALLY FUNDED PROJECTS:

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS:

Google Scholar

BOOK:

IN-MEMORY COMPUTING:

NEURO-VECTOR SYMBOLIC ARCHITECTURES:

NEUROMORPHIC COMPUTING:

EXPLORATORY MEMORY:

  • G. S. Syed, et al., "Phase-change memory for in-memory computing", Chemical Reviews, 2025
  • M. Lanza, et al., "The growing memristor industry", Nature, 2025
  • M. Lanza, A. Sebastian, et al., "Memristive technologies for data storage, computation, encryption, and radio-frequency communication", Science, 2022
  • M. Le Gallo and A. Sebastian, "An overview of phase-change memory device physics", J. Phys. D. Appl. Phys., 2020
  • Salinga*, B. Kersting, I. Ronneberger, V. P. Jonnalagadda, X. T. Vu, M. Le Gallo, I. Giannopoulos, O. Cojocaru-Miredin, R. Mazzarello, A. Sebastian*, “Monatomic phase change memory”, Nature Materials, 2018 (Cover)
  • Le Gallo, D. Krebs, F. Zipolli, M. Salinga, A. Sebastian, “Collective structural relaxation in phase-change memory devices”, Adv. Electronic Materials, 2018
  • W. Burr, M. J. Brightsky, A. Sebastian et al., “Recent progress in phase-change memory technology”, IEEE Journal on emerging and selected topics in circuits and systems, 2016
  • Le Gallo, A. Athmanathan, D. Krebs, A. Sebastian, “Evidence for thermally assisted threshold switching behavior in nanoscale phase-change memory cells”, Journal of Applied Physics, 119, 025704, 2016
  • Le Gallo, M. Kaes, A. Sebastian, D. Krebs, “Subthreshold electrical transport in amorphous phase change materials”, New Journal of Physics., 2015
  • C. A. Santini*, A. Sebastian*, C. Marchiori, V. P. Jonnalagadda,  L. Dellmann, W. W. Koelmans, M. D. Rossell, C. P. Rossel, E. Eleftheriou, “Oxygenated amorphous carbon for resistive memory applications”, Nature Communications, 2015
  • W. Koelmans*, A. Sebastian, V. P. Jonnalagadda, D. Krebs, L. Dellmann, E. Eleftheriou, Projected phase-change memory devices, Nature communications, 6, 2015
  • A. Sebastian, D. Krebs, M. Le Gallo, H. Pozidis, E. Eleftheriou, “A Collective Relaxation Model for Resistance Drift in Phase Change Memory Cells”, Proc. IEEE International Reliability Physics Symposium, 2015
  • A. Sebastian*, M. Le Gallo, D. Krebs, “Crystal growth within a phase change memory cell”, Nature Communications, 5(4314), 1-9, 2014
  • A.  Sebastian*, A. Pauza , C. Rossel, R. M. Shelby, A. F. Rodriguez, H. Pozidis and E. Eleftheriou, “Resistance switching at the nanometer scale in amorphous carbon”, New Journal of Physics, vol. 13, pp. 013020, 2011
  • Sebastian*, N. Papandreou, A. Pantazi, H. Pozidis and E. Eleftheriou, “Non-resistance based cell-state metric for multi-level phase change memory”, Journal of Applied Physics, 110, 084505, 2011
  • N. Papandreou, A. Pantazi, Sebastian, E. Eleftheriou, M. J. Breitwisch, C. Lam, H. Pozdis, “Estimation of Amorphous Fraction in Multilevel Phase Change Memory Cells”, Solid-state electronics, vol. 54(9), 2010

NANOSCALE DYNAMICS AND CONTROL:

SELECTED TALKS/LECTURES/PANELS:

LECTURES:

  • King's College London, Oct. 2024
  • Physikalisches Kolloquium, Univ. Heidelberg, Jan. 2024
  • MIT, Cambridge, USA, Nov. 2023
  • Texas A&M, USA, Oct. 2023
  • University of Oxford, UK, Feb. 2023
  • IEEE Distinguished Lecture, Jan 2023
  • University of Southampton, UK, Mar. 2022
  • University of Oxford, UK, Feb. 2022
  • Future Computing Laboratory, ETH Zurich, Oct. 2021
  • Intelligence in chip: Tomorrow of integrated circuits, IEEE CASS seasonal school, Aug. 2021
  • Max Planck Institute of Microsctructure Physics, July 2021
  • Mondays in Memory (MiM), TU Vienna, June 2021
  • Lund University, June 2021
  • Computer Architecture Fall 2020, ETH Zurich, Dec. 2020
  • University College London, March 2020
  • Institute of Neuroinformatics, Univ. Zurich., Nov. 2019
  • Sabanci University, Istanbul, Turkey, April 2019
  • Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey, April 2019
  • University of Oxford, Oxford, UK, March 2019
  • Computer Systems Colloquium, Stanford University, Stanford, USA, Mar 2018
  • CDT Advanced Technology Lectures, Univ. of Cambridge, UK, 2016
  • Univ. of Oxford, UK, 2015

TUTORIALS:

  • Short course, DRC 2024, June 2024
  • EDTM, Mar. 2024
  • Short course, IEDM 2023, Dec. 2023
  • Photonics online meetup, Jan. 2021
  • IEDM, San Francisco, Dec. 2019
  • ISCAS, Sapporo, Japan, May 2019
  • MRS Spring Meeting, Phoenix, Arizona, USA, 2017

TALKS:

  • Keynote, DRC, Durham, Jun. 2025
  • Keynote, ASP-DAC, Tokyo, Jan. 2025
  • Invited Talk, 1st EFCL International Workshop on Sustainable AI, Zurich, Nov. 2024
  • Keynote, DRC 2024, Jun. 2024
  • Keynote, ICNCE, Jun. 2024
  • Invited Talk, EPS Forum, Berlin, Mar. 2024
  • Invited Talk, Memrisys 2023, Nov. 2023
  • Invited Talk, Heidelberg, Sep. 2023
  • Invited Talk, Max Planck, Sep. 2023
  • Panelist, Montreaux, Apr. 2023
  • Keynote, Memrisys, Boston, USA, Dec 2022
  • Invited Talk, DAC Workshop, San Francisco, USA, July 2022
  • Invited Talk, Embedded PCM workshop, Agrate, Italy, June 2022
  • Invited Talk, Juelich Forschungszentrum, Germany, May 2022
  • Invited Talk, EMRS, May 2022 (virtual)
  • Keynote, IEEE International Conference on IC Design and Technology (ICICDT), Sep. 2021.
  • Invited Talk, Workshop on Materials Challenges for Memory (APL Materials), April 2021
  • Invited Talk, Neurotech Forum II, Workshop on Neuromorphic computing technologies: Opportunities, challenges and Applications, March 2021
  • Invited Talk, NEUROTECH educational program, Jan. 2021
  • Invited Talk, CASCONxEVOKE, Nov. 2020
  • Invited Talk, Nature conference on neuromorphic computing, Beijing, Oct. 2019
  • Ovshinsky Lecture, EP\COS, Grenoble, Sep. 2019
  • Invited Talk, CLEO Europe, Munich, Germany, June 2019
  • Invited Talk, VLSI, Kyoto, Japan, June 2019
  • Invited Talk, DATE Workshop, Florence, Italy, March 2019
  • Plenary Talk, ICEE, Bangalore, India, Dec 2018
  • Invited Talk, NVMTS, Sendai, Japan, October 2018
  • Invited Talk, E/PCOS, Catania, Italy, September 2018
  • Invited Talk, CIMTEC, Perugia, Italy, June 2018
  • Invited Talk, MRS Spring Meeting, Phoenix, Arizona, USA, April 2018
  • Invited Talk, mDAC: Memristor Technology, Desing, Automation and Computing, HiPEAC, Manchester, UK, Jan 2018
  • Keynote, 17th Non-volatile Memory Technology Symposium, Aachen, Germany, 2017
  • Keynote, International Conference on Memristive Materials, Devices and Systems, Athens, Greece, 2017
  • Invited Talk, Beyond CMOS: From Devices to Systems, Haifa, Israel, 2017
  • Invited Talk, MINDMEM Workshop, Lausanne, Switzerland, 2017
  • Invited Talk, CIMTEC, Perugia, Italy, 2016
  • Invited Talk, E/PCOS, Cambridge, UK, 2016
  • Invited Talk, Memristive Symposium, Dresden, Germany, 2016
  • Invited Talk, Institute for Mathematics and its Applications, Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA, 2016
  • Invited Talk, MRS Spring Meeting, Phoenix, Arizona, USA, 2016
  • Keynote Talk, Memrisys, Cyprus, 2015
  • Invited Talk, Swiss Nano Convention, Neuchatel, Switzerland, 2015

PANELS:

  • Panelist, ISCAS, May 2025
  • Panelist, Vaishwik Bharatiay Vaigyanik Summit, Oct. 2020
  • Panelist, International workshop on network on chip architectures, Oct. 2020
  • Panelist, AICAS, Sep. 2020

RESEARCH IN THE NEWS:

PRIMARY COLLABORATORS (IBM):

PRIMARY COLLABORATORS (EXTERNAL):

Projects

Top collaborators