Once the system includes more neurons and the kinks are
worked out, it could supply data centers, autonomous cars, and national security services
with neural nets that are orders of magnitude faster than existing designs, while using orders of magnitude less power, according to the study's two primary
authors, Yichen Shen, a physicist, and Nicholas Harris, an
electrical engineer, both at MIT.
The
work was conducted by AMBER and RCSI TERG post-doctoral researcher, Dr Alan Ryan, first
author on the paper
with Dr Cathal Kearney, an AMBER senior research fellow and lecturer in RCSI in partnership
with multi-disciplinary team of researchers based in RCSI, Trinity and Professor Katja Schenke - Layland's laboratory in Eberhard Karls University Tübingen in Germany, where the
electrical stimulation research was carried out.