Inspiring Jew from Today: Dr Michal Lipson
Artificial intelligence is changing the world. But behind every AI chatbot and search engine are enormous data centres moving unfathomable amounts of information every second.
As computers became more powerful, moving that information quickly became one of the biggest challenges facing the industry.
In 2001, Israeli physicist Dr Michal Lipson began working on an idea that many thought impossible: using light instead of electricity to move information around computer chips.
Born in Haifa, she studied physics at the Technion before continuing her research in the United States. In 2004, she made a breakthrough that showed silicon could be used to guide and control light on computer chips. Her breakthrough sparked a wave of research that helped establish silicon photonics as one of the fastest-growing fields in computing, with scientists around the world building on her discoveries.
Today, silicon photonics is used throughout the communications systems and data centres that power cloud computing and AI. Her pioneering research has earned some of science's highest honours, including membership of both the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and the U.S. National Academy of Engineering.
Dr Michal Lipson's breakthroughs helped lay the foundations for the silicon photonics technology that now powers much of today's AI and cloud computing infrastructure.