Dr Bowei Dong, Department of Materials, University of Oxford. Conventional computer chip processing efficiency doubles every 18 months, but the processing power required by modern AI tasks is currently doubling around every 3.5 months. One approach is to use light instead of electronics – this allows multiple calculations to be carried out in parallel using different wavelengths to represent different sets of data. This work resulted in the birth of the photonic AI company, Salience Labs, a spin-out from the University of Oxford. Hardware innovations and computations are underpinned by fundamental advances in device materials and innovative uses of their unique properties.
