Will I See You at Upgrade 2025?
It’s almost here! Upgrade 2025 is only a little more than a month away. This year’s in-person event will be held on April 9-10, 2025 at the Metreon City View in San Francisco. Upgrade 2025 will bring together researchers, scientists, executives and industry experts to highlight how we bridge the gap from innovative ideas to tangible advancements, propelling the world into a new era shaped by artificial intelligence (AI). I know I may be a little biased, but Upgrade is my favorite event of the year. And this year’s summit is poised to be the best Upgrade yet.?
Under the theme of “Innovation for the New Reality,” Upgrade 2025 will cover multiple topics, including photonics, the Innovative Optical & Wireless Network (IOWN) initiative,?thin-film lithium niobate, the coherent Ising machine, encryption technology such as attribute-based encryption (ABE), cryptography, the physics of AI, workforce transformation, open innovation, space integrated computing, critical care anywhere, sustainable data center technology and more. The event is anchored by an impressive EXPO that will be open on both April 9 and 10. The EXPO will feature more than 25 exhibits showcasing the journey from Research (discovery & invention) to Development (proof of concept) to Commercialization (ready for business). Day one of Upgrade will also include a special Welcome Reception that will serve as the official kick-off party for Upgrade 2025.
Day two will feature an impressive slate of keynotes, panels and presentations. I’m particularly excited about welcoming two distinguished keynote speakers that will join me on stage to begin the day on April 10 – Jun Sawada, Executive Chairman of the Board at NTT, and Abhijit Dubey, President and CEO of NTT DATA, Inc. We will provide an overview of the latest research and innovation from NTT groups around the world, including how innovation happens in the time of AI in an effort to foster a greater understanding of the technology, its opportunities and pitfalls. The opening keynotes will be followed by a series of panel discussions featuring a distinguished group of innovators, researchers and thought leaders. You can view the full list of presentations and speakers here.
Are you as excited for Upgrade 2025 as I am? I certainly hope so. And if you have not registered to attend the event, you can do so here.
I hope to see you at Upgrade 2025!
-Kazu
Upgrade 2025 – Innovation for the New Reality
How might innovation lead to new AI applications? How can it address the energy needs required by new levels of computation, or tackle sustainability issues? What might privacy and security innovation look like when there may soon be LLMs dedicated to subverting today’s safeguards??These are some of the questions that Upgrade 2025 will aim to address. Watch the video below to learn more about Upgrade 2025.
Recapping SPIE Photonics?
At SPIE Photonics West 2025, members of NTT Research’s Physics & Informatics (PHI) Lab authored several papers presented at the conference. Notably, PHI Lab Scientist Byoung Jun Park presented the paper “Hyperspectral compute-in-memory architecture and key optical components,” and introduced a hyperspectral compute-in-memory architecture that simultaneously utilizes frequency and space dimensions for single-shot matrix-matrix multiplication. Learn more about the paper here. You can view a full list of NTT papers presented at SPIE Photonics West 2025 here.
Biohybrid Rays Leverage ML Application for Efficiency Gains
Earlier this month, NTT Research Medical & Health Informatics (MEI) Lab Scientist Ryoma Ishii and researchers from Harvard’s John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) unveiled research on an application of machine-learning directed optimization (ML-DO) that efficiently searches for high-performance design configurations in the context of biohybrid robots. Looking ahead, the researchers will continue to explore future applications of biohybrid robots for remote sensing, drug delivery and advance their understanding of 3D organ biofabrication, such as a biohybrid heart. Learn more about this incredible discovery here (Share on X, LinkedIn & BlueSky).
A New, Faster Chip
MIT researchers have designed and built the world's first chip capable of computing the entire deep neural network using photons, including linear and non-linear operations. Jacek Krywko of Ars Technica, provides a deep dive into the new, faster chip in his recent article, "Getting an all-optical AI to handle non-linear math." The research findings are outlined in-depth by MIT researcher and PHI Lab postdoc Saumil Bandyopadhyay, who shares insights into latency, neural networks and photonic chips. Learn more here (Share on X, LinkedIn & BlueSky).
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NTT Research In The News
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