EPFL researchers have invented a way of automatically working out what data needs to be put into a complex system – such as a fiber optic network – in order to get the desired result. Their solution could prove especially useful in robotics, medicine and image projection.
In any system, you need some kind of input and output, with an action taking place in between. But when that action is particularly complex or requires large amounts of synchronized data, how do you know what input is needed to get the right output? Researchers from the Laboratory of Applied Photonics Devices (LAPD) and Optics Laboratory (LO) at EPFL have found a solution. They’ve invented an algorithm that can determine what data needs to be fed into a fiber optic network in order to get the desired result at the other end. Their research has just been published in the journal Nature Machine Intelligence.
The researchers developed an image projection system to demonstrate their technique. In a maze-like network of lasers, light beams go from one magnifying glass to the next and from one fiber to the next, taking coded information with them. At the other end, the information is decoded on a little screen, where a series of green images appear – a galloping horse, a wandering person and a strange ghost.
Source: “Using artificial intelligence to enhance complex systems”, Sarah Perrin, EPFL News
