In this special year, The Institute for Energy Efficiency at UC Santa Barbara held three virtual workshops as part of the 2020 Emerging Technologies Review.

In this special year, The Institute for Energy Efficiency at UC Santa Barbara held three virtual workshops as part of the 2020 Emerging Technologies Review.

The ETR virtual workshops covered new developments in: Energy Efficient Clouds and Data Centers on October 2nd; Smart Societal Infrastructure on October 16th; and Food-Energy-Water on October 23rd. Each virtual workshop featured world class experts and leaders in that arena from industry, academia and government.

The current scale of plastics production and the accompanying waste disposal problems represent a largely untapped opportunity for chemical upcycling. Tandem catalytic conversion by platinum supported on γ-alumina converts various polyethylene grades in high yields to liquid alkyl aromatics in the absence of added solvent or molecular hydrogen. These molecules can be used as biodegradable detergents. Coupling exothermic hydrogenolysis with endothermic aromatization renders the overall process thermodynamically accessible despite the moderate reaction temperature.

In this special year, The Institute for Energy Efficiency at UC Santa Barbara held three virtual workshops as part of the 2020 Emerging Technologies Review.

Driven by the growth of AI Training and Inference applications, data center optical networks continue to penetrate into the compute fabric where electrical interfaces struggle to keep pace with increasing bandwidth interconnect requirements.

The energy efficiency of computing has improved by a factor of more than a trillion since the electronic computer was invented.  This astounding energy efficiency scaling is creating the opportunity for battery-free sensing and computing systems that are powered by radio waves and other ambient energy sources.  Such devices can be implanted inside the body, permanently built into structures, or deployed at scales where batteries and wires are infeasible.  I will describe my group’s work aiming to enable battery-free, perpetual sensing and computing systems.  I will descr

Data centers consume 1-2% of the world’s electricity, and concerns about their energy use are growing as the world becomes increasingly interconnected and digitalized. Few data center operators publicly report electricity use, necessitating the use of mathematical models for generating the sector-level energy use estimates that guide public policy and shape public perceptions.

The second quantum revolution, the transition from quantum theory to quantum engineering, is leading us towards practical quantum computing. However, there are still many obstacles hindering practical quantum computing. In this talk, I will briefly review the challenges and research opportunities in the state-of-the-art quantum computing engineering technology stacks, including quantum computing devices, peripheral control hardware architecture, compiler design/optimization, programming language design, etc.

Quantum computing promises to transform society in all aspects, from the rapid discovery of new drugs and vaccines to improving supply chain efficiency, real-time optimization of transportation and navigation, and the secure storage and transmission of personal information. While there are several contenders for the physical implementation of quantum computers, integrated photonics is advantageous for several reasons.

Photonic isolators are essentially diodes for optical signals, and as such they prevent backward propagation of light as needed, most frequently in front of lasers as protection from reflected power. After introducing the phenomenon of non-reciprocity, the operation of commercial (bulk) isolators will be discussed, including magneto-optical Faraday rotation which is prevalent in iron garnets.  Although commercial isolators have their own markets, future hyperscale data needs are moving ever closer to integrated photonics as pluggable transceivers are replaced by co-packaged optics.