European Training Network on Post-Digital Computing + (POSTDIGITAL+)

ongoing

The future economic growth in Europe requires engineers and researchers capable to design, develop and implement new information technologies to support explosive data-driven transformation of economy, public and government activities. The analysis of this data demands a massive increase in processing power and communication bandwidth. Current information, computing and processing technologies strongly rely on the classical digital approaches and architectures developed by von Neumann. However, technological progress rates of digital technologies are flattening out and are about to hit their ultimate, physical ceilings (“end of Moore’s law”). This growing gap between what is demanded and what can be delivered becomes exacerbated by the increasingly inacceptable energy consumption of the global ICT infrastructure, whose relevance is amplified by the pressing and approaching climate crisis. In this situation, both academic and industrial ICT research has started to investigate and invest in so-called “unconventional”, nature-inspired approaches to computing which radically depart from the classical digital paradigm. European Doctoral Network on POSTDIGITAL Plus brings together internationally leading teams from academia, research centres and leaders of industry, including IBM, Thales, Hewlett Packard Enterprise Belgium and three regarded start-ups NcodiN, Akhetronics and VLC Photonics in the field of optical computing to train a cohort of 15 doctoral candidates in the inter-disciplinary fields of emerging disruptive neuromorphic computational technologies and their applications. POST-DIGITAL Plus has the ambition and the vision to create a new generation of scientific and industrial leaders that will greatly contribute to strengthening Europe’s human resources and industry competitiveness in future digital and post digital economy and technology.