East-West paths to unconventional computing

Magnetic skyrmions for unconventional computing

Improvements in computing performance have significantly slowed down over the past few years owing to the intrinsic limitations of computing hardware. However, the demand for data computing has increased exponentially. To solve this problem, tremendous attention has been focused on the continuous scaling of Moore's law as well as the advanced non-von Neumann computing architecture. A rich variety of unconventional computing paradigms has been devised with the rapid development of nanoscale devices. Magnetic skyrmions, spin swirling quasiparticles, have been endowed with great expectations for unconventional computing due to their potential as the smallest information carriers by exploiting their physics and dynamics. In this paper, we provide an overview of the recent progress of skyrmion-based unconventional computing from a joint device-application perspective. This paper aims to build up a panoramic picture, analyze the remaining challenges, and most importantly to shed light on the outlook of skyrmion based unconventional computing for interdisciplinary researchers.

Modeling the peak of emergence in systems: Design and katachi

It is difficult to model emergence in biological systems using reductionist paradigms. A requirement for computational modeling is that individual entities can be recorded parametrically and related logically, but their transformation into whole systems cannot be captured this way. The problem stems from an inability to formally represent the implicit influences that inform emergent organization, such as context, shifts in causal agency or scale, and self-reference. This lack hampers biological systems modeling and its computational counterpart, indicating a need for new fundamental abstraction frameworks that support system-level characteristics. We develop an approach that formally captures these characteristics, focusing on the way they come together to enable transformation at the 'peak' of the emergent process. An example from virology is presented, in which two seemingly antagonistic systems - the herpes cold sore virus and its host - are capable of altering their basic biological objectives to achieve a new equilibrium. The usual barriers to modeling this process are overcome by incorporating mechanisms from practices centered on its emergent peak: design and katachi. In the Japanese science of form, katachi refers to the emergence of intrinsic structure from real situations, where an optimal balance between implicit influences is achieved. Design indicates how such optimization is guided by principles of flow. These practices leverage qualities of situated abstraction, which we understand through the intuitive method of physicist Kôdi Husimi. Early results indicate that this approach can capture the functional transformations of biological emergence, whilst being reasonably computable. Due to its geometric foundations and narrative-based extension to logic, the method will also generate speculative predictions. This research forms the foundations of a new biomedical modeling platform, which is discussed.