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The Most Exciting New Frontiers in Information Technology

by American Institute of Physics


What new paradigms of cognitive hardware technologies and quantum computing are coming to help accelerate the future of computing and make the best use of artificial intelligence (AI)?

 

Heike Riel, an IBM Fellow and director of Internet of Things (IoT) Technology Solutions at IBM Research, will discuss those very questions during a Plenary Session at this year’s OSA Frontiers in Optics + Laser Science APS/DLS Conference.

 

The extraordinary enhancements that have occurred in computing power during the past 50 years were driven by a goal of getting “faster and cheaper” computers, but consumers also benefited from the “smaller and denser” transistors—the building blocks of each computer—that emerged. In her talk, Riel will provide an overview of research activities within the field of extending the core technology roadmaps, as well as new paradigms of cognitive hardware technologies and quantum computing.
 

“Today, the most exciting new frontiers of information technology are non-von Neumann computing and quantum computing,” Riel said. “Cognitive hardware technologies are targeted to significantly accelerate machine learning and AI workloads, while quantum computing is targeted to solve problems that are intractable via classical computers.”

 

AI is being fueled by an exponential growth in data, the widespread availability of increased compute power, and advances in algorithms. “But computation is still a limiting factor,” Riel said. “Training machine-learning models, for instance, requires significant computing power. So the compute throughput and energy efficiency both need to increase significantly.”

 

She will present new concepts about how to achieve this, as well as insights into the next computing technologies that will be necessary to deliver the performance for future applications like AI.

Posted: 10 Sep 2018 by American Institute of Physics