Intel Labs’ Top Moments of 2024

Scott Bair is a key voice at Intel Labs, sharing insights into innovative research for inventing tomorrow’s technology.

Highlights:

• This year, Intel Labs researchers developed innovative technologies, received awards, obtained fellowships, and presented cutting-edge research at conferences around the world.
• Key highlights of 2024 include Intel’s announcement that it built the world's largest neuromorphic system. Additionally, Intel became the first semiconductor manufacturer to demonstrate the distribution of cryogenic silicon spin qubit control electronics inside the dilution refrigerator at different temperature stages, and Intel demonstrated the industry’s most advanced and first-ever fully integrated optical compute interconnect chiplet co-packaged with an Intel CPU and running live data.
• Intel Labs researchers also had a strong presence at many conferences this year as researchers presented advancements in computer vision, pattern recognition, machine learning, robotics, artificial intelligence, and more.
  
  

This was an exciting year for Intel Labs researchers as they developed innovative technologies, received awards, obtained fellowships, and presented cutting-edge research at conferences around the world.

Looking back, one key highlight of 2024 was Intel’s announcement that it has built the world's largest neuromorphic system, code-named Hala Point. Additionally, Intel became the first semiconductor manufacturer to demonstrate the distribution of cryogenic silicon spin qubit control electronics inside the dilution refrigerator at different temperature stages. This year, Intel’s Integrated Photonics Solutions (IPS) Group also demonstrated the industry’s most advanced and first-ever fully integrated optical compute interconnect (OCI) chiplet co-packaged with an Intel CPU and running live data.

Furthermore, Intel was pleased to highlight Intel Senior Fellow Pradeep K. Dubey, who was named a 2023 Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Fellow for his lifelong technical contributions to emerging compute- and data-intensive applications and parallel processing computer architectures. Intel also presented its 2023 Outstanding Researcher Awards (ORAs) to fifteen leading academic researchers.

Intel Labs researchers also had a strong presence at many conferences this year as researchers presented advancements in computer vision, pattern recognition, machine learning, robotics, artificial intelligence, and more. Contributions cover everything from improving training efficiency with small-scale inverted data for knowledge distillation to a novel diffusion-based framework for articulated 3D asset generation.

These works represent only a fraction of the advancements and contributions from Intel Labs this year; however, these accomplishments stood out for their potential to shape the future of technology in powerful ways. Continue reading below for a brief description of Intel Labs’ top moments of 2024 (in order of publication).

Innovative Technologies from Intel in 2024

Fully Homomorphic Encryption

Fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) has emerged as a groundbreaking advancement in privacy-enhanced technologies for encrypted computing. FHE allows data to be processed in encrypted form without exposing the raw data for secure data collaboration in fields such as healthcare and finance. Intel’s work, including an application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) and new software enablement tools, is at the forefront of technology and standards development for FHE.

Intel Builds World’s Largest Neuromorphic System to Enable More Sustainable AI

This year, Intel announced that it has built the world's largest neuromorphic system. Code-named Hala Point, this large-scale neuromorphic system, initially deployed at Sandia National Laboratories, utilizes Intel’s Loihi 2 processor, aims at supporting research for future brain-inspired artificial intelligence (AI), and tackles challenges related to the efficiency and sustainability of today’s AI. Hala Point advances Intel’s first-generation large-scale research system, Pohoiki Springs, with architectural improvements to achieve over 10 times more neuron capacity and up to 12 times higher performance.

Intel’s Millikelvin Quantum Research Control Chip Provides Denser Integration with Qubits

Large-scale silicon qubit control requires closer integration of control electronics to qubits at the millikelvin stage of the dilution refrigerator to address the wiring bottleneck limiting the scaling of quantum computing. Based on newly released research at the 2024 IEEE Symposium on VLSI Technology & Circuits, Intel’s millikelvin cryogenic control chip, code-named Pando Tree, established the company as the first semiconductor manufacturer to demonstrate the distribution of cryogenic silicon spin qubit control electronics inside the dilution refrigerator at different temperature stages. Using both control chips, Horse Ridge II at the 4 kelvin stage and Pando Tree at the 10 to 20 millikelvin stage, achieves a more efficient overall solution for large-scale silicon qubit control. Deploying traditional complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) circuit capability at the millikelvin stage will enable quantum scaling to millions of qubits in the future.

Intel Demonstrates First Fully Integrated Optical I/O Chiplet

In 2024, Intel achieved a revolutionary milestone in integrated photonics technology for high-speed data transmission. At this year’s Optical Fiber Communication Conference (OFC), Intel’s Integrated Photonics Solutions (IPS) Group demonstrated the industry’s most advanced and first-ever fully integrated optical compute interconnect (OCI) chiplet co-packaged with an Intel CPU and running live data. Intel’s OCI chiplet represents a leap forward in high-bandwidth interconnect by enabling co-packaged optical input/output (I/O) in emerging AI infrastructure for data centers and high-performance computing (HPC) applications.

Nature Machine Intelligence Publishes Intel Labs’ Neuromorphic Research on Visual Perception

Published in the June 2024 issue of Nature Machine Intelligence, two Intel Labs research papers present novel neuromorphic computing solutions using Intel’s Loihi neuromorphic research chip to solve robotics visual perception problems in scene understanding and visual odometry (VO). The first paper develops a new approach to visual perception and scene understanding using resonator networks, a new type of neural network. Meanwhile, the companion paper demonstrates how resonator networks can be used in real-world tasks for visual odometry in robotics. When combined with energy-efficient Loihi neuromorphic hardware, resonator networks can act as a perceptual engine for mobile devices. The research will enable drones, satellites, and other energy-constrained edge devices to analyze sensor input in ways that resemble perception in animals and humans.

Intel Labs Introduces RAG-FiT Open-Source Framework for Retrieval Augmented Generation in LLMs

This year, Intel Labs introduced RAG-FiT, an open-source framework for augmenting large language models (LLMs) for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) use cases. Available under an Apache 2.0 license, RAG-FiT integrates data creation, training, inference, and evaluation into a single workflow, assisting in the creation of data-augmented datasets for training and evaluating LLMs in RAG settings. This integration enables rapid prototyping and experimentation with various RAG techniques, allowing users to easily generate datasets and train RAG models using internal or specialized knowledge sources. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the RAG-FiT framework (formerly known as RAG Foundry), Intel Labs researchers augmented and fine-tuned Llama 3.0 and Phi-3 models with diverse RAG configurations, showcasing consistent improvements across three knowledge-intensive question-answering tasks.

Intel Co-Develops One of Three New Post-Quantum Crypto Standards Released by NIST

In August 2024, the United States National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) released three post-quantum crypto (PQC) standards for the industry and government to implement today to help protect data against potential nefarious attacks by future quantum computers. The new standards provide authenticity and confidentiality for digital transactions over the internet. One of the three standards includes an algorithm that was co-developed by Intel, known as the FIPS 205 stateless hash-based digital signature algorithm (SLH-DSA) based on the SPHINCS+ algorithm. Intel Research Scientist Christoph Dobraunig and collaborators from universities and companies worldwide worked together to create this algorithm, that can authenticate digital signatures for applications such as signing for loans or other legal documents. This standard can also provide verification of software updates and detect unauthorized modifications to data.

Recognizing Key Voices at Intel

Intel's 2023 Outstanding Researcher Awards Recognize Fifteen Academic Researchers

Intel presented its 2023 Outstanding Researcher Awards (ORAs) to fifteen leading academic researchers: Alán Aspuru-Guzik, Caroline Trippel, Chris Kim, Henrik Sønsteby, Jesús del Alamo, Joerg Appenzeller, Michael Kögel, Nam Sung Kim, Reza Shokri, Sebastian Brand, Shimeng Yu, Shreyas Sundaram, Vaughn Betz, Yanjie Shao, and Zhiru Zhang. The annual award program recognizes the exceptional contributions made through Intel university-sponsored research that help further Intel’s mission of creating world-changing technology that improves the lives of everyone on the planet.

Intel Senior Fellow Receives ACM Fellowship for Parallel Processing of Data-Intensive Applications

Intel Senior Fellow Pradeep K. Dubey was named a 2023 Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Fellow for his lifelong technical contributions to emerging compute- and data-intensive applications and parallel processing computer architectures. As director of the Parallel Computing Lab, a part of the Intel Labs organization at Intel Corporation, Dubey has led a team of top researchers focused on state-of-the-art research to improve the performance and scalability of applications that require high compute power and handle large amounts of data. The ACM Fellowship recognizes the top 1% of association members for their outstanding accomplishments in computing and information technology and/or exceptional service to ACM and the larger computing community. These contributions have advanced technologies used every day to improve the lives of people around the world.

Intel at Events Around the World

Intel Labs Presents 24 Papers on Innovative AI and Computer Vision Research at CVPR 2024

Intel Labs presented 24 papers accepted at the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR 2024). The event features the latest advances in computer vision, pattern recognition, machine learning, robotics, and artificial intelligence. Six Intel Labs papers have been accepted as main conference papers, including highlight paper LiSA: LiDAR Localization with Semantic Awareness, which is the first method that incorporates semantic awareness into scene coordinate regression to boost localization accuracy. The other main conference papers cover topics including using egocentric action scene graphs for long-form understanding of egocentric videos, a new framework for editing 2D images by incorporating 3D tools, a generalizable AI framework that can create panorama and 3D images from multiple input modalities, improving training efficiency with small-scale inverted data for knowledge distillation, and a novel approach to model fingerprinting.

Digital Twins Platform Simplifies Venue Planning

Intel® Xeon® processors are powering a user-friendly digital twinning platform that helps event planners and stakeholders design, map, and plan venue layouts for the Olympic and Paralympic Games Paris 2024. Using customer information, the development team uses gaming workstations equipped with Intel® Arc™ A770 graphics cards and Intel® CPUs to create highly detailed digital models of stadiums and other event spaces.

Once uploaded to upstream computing instances supported by custom Intel Xeon processors, Paris 2024 operations and planning stakeholders can simultaneously explore the digital simulation and modify the virtual venue layouts through any web browser. In addition, because the event models reduce the need for Paris 2024 organizers to visit physical sites, the digital twinning platform has the potential to save time and money, while helping to reduce their carbon footprint. Remote preparation of security measures, logistics, and crowd control strategies also reduces costs and lessens the event’s environmental impact by minimizing travel.

Intel Presents Novel AI Research at NeurIPS 2024

Intel is proud to be a platinum sponsor of this year’s Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2024). Intel is also presenting 39 papers at the conference, including eight at the main conference. Contributions include the first foundation model for inductive reasoning that can zero-shot answer logical queries on any knowledge graphs, an encoder-decoder transformer model designed specifically for translating between programming languages and their HPC extensions, a challenging benchmark to extend the predictability range of data-driven weather emulators, and a novel diffusion-based framework for articulated 3D asset generation. Intel researchers also organized several workshops, demos, socials, and networking events covering various branches of AI research.

Intel Labs AI Researchers Featured as Part of Innovation Selects 2024

Intel’s Innovation Selects features specially curated technical talks, demos, and product deep dives, each tailored for developers and tech enthusiasts. As part of the collection, Intel Labs was proud to present groundbreaking work in artificial intelligence. Read the full blog and watch the videos to learn from our researchers about how Intel Labs is pushing the state of the art in AI by establishing open-source tools and new open benchmarks for industry and academia. Listen as they teach about how human-centric cognitive AI is the future of machine learning. Intel Labs’ work was also highlighted in a demonstration that compares the Intel Scalable Vector Search library to the widely used open-source vector search library HNSWlib. Results show a latency improvement of over eight times compared to HNSWlib when using 45 million vector embeddings with 1536 dimensions.