Researchers have developed an optical convolutional neural network accelerator capable of processing large amounts of information. This interesting news came to us from EurekAlert! in their article, “Developing smarter, faster machine intelligence with light.”
This is important news because when they say large, it is in the area of petabytes, per second. This innovation harnesses the massive parallelism of light, heralds a new era of optical signal processing for machine learning. There are vast amounts of potential applications, including in self-driving cars, 5G networks, data centers, biomedical diagnostics, data security and more.
Researchers at the George Washington University, together with researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the deep-tech venture startup Optelligence LLC, get the credit for this innovation, which was created in a response to global demand.
“Optics allows for processing large-scale matrices in a single time-step, which allows for new scaling vectors of performing convolutions optically. This can have significant potential for machine learning applications as demonstrated here.” said Puneet Gupta, professor & vice chair of computer engineering at UCLA.
Melody K. Smith
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