POSTDIGITALPLUS EUROPEAN TRAINING NETWORK ON POST-DIGITAL COMPUTING +

The modern information and communication technology (ICT) world is ruled by an exploding generation of data due to growth of Internet applications and skyrocketing proliferation of a number of interconnected on-line broadband services (clouds, Facebook, Google, YouTube, on-demand HD video streams, on-line business analytics and content sharing, telepresence, and so on), smartphones, industrial sensor networks, and other applications. The analysis of this data demands a massive increase in processing power and communication bandwidth. In the past, this ever-growing demand could be met by the exponential increase in digital data storage capacities and processing technologies (“Moore’s law”). However, technological progress rates of digital technologies are flattening out and are about to hit their ultimate, physical ceilings (“end of Moore’s law”). This growing gap between what is demanded and what can be delivered becomes exacerbated by the increasingly inacceptable energy consumption of the global ICT infrastructure, whose relevance is amplified by the pressing and approaching climate crisis. In this situation, both academic and industrial ICT research has started to investigate and invest in so-called “unconventional”, nature-inspired approaches to computing which radically depart from the classical digital paradigm. Two major goals in this pursuit are to exploit the potential speed and energy advantages that computing with light offers over computing with electrons in terms of parallel processing, and the advantage that analog computing offers over digital computing when applied to novel artificial neural network designs that are capable to perform even a lower resolution.