Perspectives on computing trends – implications for the edge

Speaker: Anand Chandrasekher

Time: 7:00 PM – 7:35 PM

This talk will look at market and technology trends over the last 2 decades and trends over the next decade; and, will make some observations and projections regarding likely outcomes.   

From inverse design to implementation of robust and efficient photonics for computing

Speaker: Dr. Jelena Vuckovic

Time: 7:35 PM – 8:10 PM

It is estimated that nearly 10% of the world electricity is consumed in information processing and computing, including data centers [D.A.B. Miller, Journal of Lightwave Technology, 2017]. It is clear that the exponential growth in use of these technologies is not sustainable unless dramatic changes are made to computing hardware, in order to increase its speed and energy efficiency. Optical interconnects are considered a solution to these obstacles, with potential to reduce energy consumption in on-chip optical interconnects to atto-Joule per bit (aJ/bit), while increasing operating speed beyond 20GHz. However, the state of the art photonics is bulky, inefficient, sensitive to environment, lossy, and its performance is severely degraded in real-world environment as opposed to ideal laboratory conditions, which has prevented from using it in many practical applications, including interconnects. Therefore, it is clear that new approaches for implementing photonics are crucial.

We have recently developed a computational approach to inverse-design photonics based on desired performance, with fabrication constraints and structure robustness incorporated in design process. Our approach performs physics guided search through the full parameter space until the optimal solution is reached. Resulting device designs are non-intuitive, but are fabricable using standard techniques, resistant to temperature variations of hundreds of degrees, typical fabrication errors, and they outperform state of the art counterparts by many orders of magnitude in footprint, efficiency and stability. This is completely different from conventional approach to design photonics, which is almost always performed by brute-force or intuition-guided tuning of a few parameters of known structures, until satisfactory performance is achieved, and which almost always leads to sub-optimal designs.

Apart from integrated photonics, our approach is also applicable to any other optical and quantum optical devices and systems.

Content Creation and Consumption Changes with 5G

Speaker: Amy LaMeyer

Time: 8:10 PM – 8:45 PM

The way humans compute, collaborate, and communicate is rapidly changing with the advent of spatial computing technologies like XR— and with 5G, creating and consuming content in virtual and augmented reality will become faster or more accessible. Immersive tech will alter the fundamental ways we do business, and is already innovating industries like healthcare, enterprise, education, and media.

Leveraging 5G’s high bandwidth and low-latency to power XR tools, spatial computing startups are showing established companies the way of the future with higher learning retention and engagement, decreased costs, and saved time. A 5G network is an important component to enable our next phase of human computing.

Power Management – 5G is broken!!!  Can it be fixed?

Speaker: Brian Zahnstecher

Time: 8:45 PM – 9:20 PM

The next-generation cellular network known as 5G is propelled with more marketing hype than foundational substance.  The exponential projections for billions or even trillions of edge devices attached to the network utilizing massive bandwidth and traffic growth are starting from an assumption that both the network and energy infrastructures exist to support such projections, which is a fundamental flaw as things exist today when you look at it from a more pragmatic view.  This talk is intended to provide some simple, yet realistic examples of the gaps that exist between the marketing projections and the reality of the situation from a number of different perspectives, including technical, market opportunity, and how these all intersect to determine the viability of the business case for what we are calling “5G” today.