Xianxin Guo, Head of Research at Oxford University spin-out Lumai is developing scalable optical computing and optical machine learning technologies to accelerate artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing.

“AI is extremely power-hungry and the requirement of computing power is exploding, which conventional digital electronics is struggling to keep up with," Guo says. "Photonics is a promising solution due to its ultra-fast clock, ultra-high energy efficiency, and a vast amount of parallelisms.”