ERC Advanced Grant · 2024
Probabilistic photonic computing
The neuroscience principle of free energy minimization (FEM) suggests that living organisms create internal models of their environment in order to minimize surprise and manage uncertainty. This is strikingly different from artificial neural networks (ANNs), which prioritize maximizing accuracy. Although ANNs excel in applications such as natural language processing and weather forecasting, they struggle with real-time, safety-critical tasks like autonomous navigation due to their reliance on deterministic hardware in the von Neumann architecture which is poorly suited for distribution estimation and parameter extraction in probabilistic models. Photonic analog computing enables a paradigm…
From the public funding record at EU CORDIS. Describes the funded project, not the reviews below.