CAMBRIDGE, U.K. – A small Microsoft Research team had lofty goals when it set out four years ago to create an analog optical computer that would use light as a medium for solving complex problems.

Across modern data-intensive disciplines, the union of numerical computation, statistics, and machine learning has become ...

A line of engineering research seeks to develop computers that can tackle a class of challenges called combinatorial optimization problems. These are common in real-world applications such as ...