Photonic Reservoir Computing: Optical Recurrent Neural Networks

Photonics has long been considered an attractive substrate for next generation implementations of machine-learning concepts. Reservoir Computing tremendously facilitated the realization of recurrent neural networks in analogue hardware. This concept exploits the properties of complex nonlinear dynamical systems, giving rise to photonic reservoirs implemented by semiconductor lasers, telecommunication modulators and integrated photonic chips.

Daniel Brunner, U Besancon, France;
Miguel C. Sariano, U Illes Balears, Spain;
Guy Van der Sande, U Brussels, Belgium.