Building Innovative Hardware in an Era of Artificial Intelligence
Igor Carron, CEO and Co-Founder
LightOn.ai
Why Build Innovative Hardware?
2Copyright LightOn
3Source: Rebooting the IT Revolution: A Call to Action, SIA, SRC, 2015
4Source: Mike P. Frank, SNL
5
It’s worse!
6Source: Twitter, Coinbase
7Source: BBC
8
It’s much worse!
Copyright LightOn
The Footprint of Machine Learning
9
CO2 eq.
10Copyright LightOn
11
LightOn Confidential and Proprietary 12
Scaling up a new technology from the ground up….fast
14/06/2019 LightOn SAS 13
Scaling up a Technology fast
14Source: European Commission
Unlike NASA/FAA, we don’t have 15+ years
15Source: NASA
Surfing on Moore’s Law
16Source: TI, Huawei
Surfing Moore’s Law and Using Nature
17Copyright LightOn
A Fast and Large Random Projection
18
Linear
systemDiscrete
input vector
Discrete
output vector
(speckle intensity)
xRandom transmission matrix
H y = | H x |2
EXTRA-LARGEH of size higher than
106 x 106
(TBs of memory)
& SUPER-FAST
kHz operation →103 such
multiplies / s
Copyright LightOn
How it works
19
OPU
Results
Data pre-processing
Laser CameraOptical Random
Projections
DAC ADC
Data in Data out 010001…01111001010101…
Data processing CPU / GPU
“Big & Fat” Data
Spatial Light Modulator
OPU
Copyright LightOn
Climbing up the TRL scale fast
20Copyright LightOn
TRL 3-4 (2016) TRL 5 (2017)
TRL 6-7 (2018-2019)
Fast prototyping among a diverse set of expertise
21
Optical Processing Unit
Copyright LightOn
Why Random Projections?
14/06/2019 22Source: Volkan Cevher, EPFL
OPU: No need for large memory
23Copyright LightOn
OPU: No need for large memory
24Copyright LightOn
A Machine Learning example
14/06/2019 Copyright LightOn 25
Speed Power consumption
x8 -90%
On a typical
Machine Learning
training task
(transfer learning) + +
Other Uses Already Investigated
26
Image
classificationRecommender
systems
Graph
analysisAnomaly
detection
NLP
Video
classification
Copyright LightOn
Recommender Systems shape our lives at scale!
Recommender Systems
Copyright LightOn
Randomized Matrix Decompositions using R, Aug 2016, N. Benjamin Erichson, Sergey Voronin, Steven L. Brunton, J. Nathan Kutz
Randomized Linear Algebra
Copyright LightOn
29
LightOn.aiCopyright LightOn