Tyler O'Neal, Staff Editor

Australian researchers record world's fastest internet speed from a single optical chip

Researchers from Monash, Swinburne and RMIT universities have successfully tested and recorded Australia's fastest internet data speed, and that of the world, from a single optical chip - capable of downloading 1000 high definition movies in a split second.

Published in an academic journal, these findings have the potential to not only fast-track the next 25 years of Australia's telecommunications capacity, but also the possibility for this home-grown technology to be rolled out across the world.

In light of the pressures being placed on the world's internet infrastructure, recently highlighted by isolation policies as a result of COVID-19, the research team led by Dr. Bill Corcoran (Monash), Distinguished Professor Arnan Mitchell (RMIT) and Professor David Moss (Swinburne) were able to achieve a data speed of 44.2 Terabits per second (Tbps) from a single light source.

This technology has the capacity to support the high-speed internet connections of 1.8 million households in Melbourne, Australia, at the same time, and billions across the world during peak periods. {module INSIDE STORY}

Demonstrations of this magnitude are usually confined to a laboratory. But, for this study, researchers achieved these quick speeds using existing communications infrastructure where they were able to efficiently load-test the network.

They used a new device that replaces 80 lasers with one single piece of equipment known as a micro-comb, which is smaller and lighter than existing telecommunications hardware. It was planted into and load-tested using existing infrastructure, which mirrors that used by the NBN.

It is the first time any micro-comb has been used in a field trial and possesses the highest amount of data produced from a single optical chip.

"We're currently getting a sneak-peak of how the infrastructure for the internet will hold up in two to three years' time, due to the unprecedented number of people using the internet for remote work, socializing and streaming. It's really showing us that we need to be able to scale the capacity of our internet connections," said Dr. Bill Corcoran, co-lead author of the study and Lecturer in Electrical and Computer Systems Engineering at Monash University.

"What our research demonstrates is the ability for fibers that we already have in the ground, thanks to the NBN project, to be the backbone of communications networks now and in the future. We've developed something that is scalable to meet future needs.

"And it's not just Netflix we're talking about here - it's the broader scale of what we use our communication networks for. This data can be used for self-driving cars and future transportation and it can help the medicine, education, finance, and e-commerce industries, as well as enable us to read with our grandchildren from kilometers away."

To illustrate the impact optical micro-combs have on optimizing communication systems, researchers installed 76.6km of 'dark' optical fibers between RMIT's Melbourne City Campus and Monash University's Clayton Campus. The optical fibers were provided by Australia's Academic Research Network.

Within these fibers, researchers placed the micro-comb - contributed by Swinburne University, as part of a broad international collaboration - which acts like a rainbow made up of hundreds of high-quality infrared lasers from a single chip. Each 'laser' has the capacity to be used as a separate communications channel.

Researchers were able to send maximum data down each channel, simulating peak internet usage, across 4THz of bandwidth.

Distinguished Professor Mitchell said reaching the optimum data speed of 44.2 Tbps showed the potential of existing Australian infrastructure. The future ambition of the project is to scale up the current transmitters from hundreds of gigabytes per second towards tens of terabytes per second without increasing size, weight, or cost.

"Long-term, we hope to create integrated photonic chips that could enable this sort of data rate to be achieved across existing optical fiber links with minimal cost," Distinguished Professor Mitchell said.

"Initially, these would be attractive for ultra-high-speed communications between data centers. However, we could imagine this technology becoming sufficiently low cost and compact that it could be deployed for commercial use by the general public in cities across the world."

Professor Moss, Director of the Optical Sciences Centre at Swinburne University, said: "In the 10 years since I co-invented micro-comb chips, they have become an enormously important field of research.

"It is truly exciting to see their capability in ultra-high bandwidth fiber optic telecommunications coming to fruition. This work represents a world-record for bandwidth down a single optical fiber from a single chip source, and represents an enormous breakthrough for part of the network which does the heaviest lifting. Micro-combs offer enormous promise for us to meet the world's insatiable demand for bandwidth."

Chinese clinical decision support system helps predict individual trauma patient outcome

Tyler O'Neal, Staff Editor

Chinese researchers from The Trauma Center of Peking University People's Hospital and National Institute of Health Data Science at Peking University are using big data to help identify trauma patients who could experience potential adverse health events in the emergency department through the aid of a clinical decision support system. It was developed using a novel real-world evidence mining and evidence-based inference method, driven by an improved information storage and electronic medical records.

The researchers published their results online on February 7 in IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics: Systems, a journal of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. This is the first clinical decision support systems developed using evidential reasoning in an emergency department setting.

"Appropriate use of information technologies, particularly clinical decision support systems, may aid clinicians to make better clinical decisions and reduce the rate of medical errors," said the corresponding author Prof. Baoguo Jiang, Director of The Trauma Center of Peking University People's Hospital and China's National Center for Trauma Medicine. "By inputting clinical data of a patient, combined with available historical data, our proposed clinical decision support system outputs a predicted belief degree of severe trauma, including ICU admission and in-hospital death." {module INSIDE STORY}

"The clinical variable signs and symptoms may be interrelated and lead to a clinical outcome. For example, a patient may have a low level of consciousness because of the location of the injury, or it might be related to the high body temperature". In developing their clinical decision support system, the researchers used a trauma dataset from the emergency department at Kailuan Hospital in China, a hospital that has a close research collaboration with The Trauma Center of Peking University People's Hospital. Through the dataset, the researchers obtained the data of 1,299 trauma patients. The degree of interdependence between clinical signs and symptoms can be calculated from historical patient data. In the proposed clinical decision support system, the emergency room physician supplies information about the patient, including blood pressure, pulse rate, respiration rate, consciousness level, body temperature, age, comorbidities, mechanism and location of the injury. These clinical signs and symptoms are then processed using an evidential reasoning rule, which compares each piece against the evidence mined from real-world data to predict the probability of adverse events and to optimally manage trauma patients and help them achieve ideal outcomes, trauma patients with a high probability of being admitted to the intensive care unit or dying in a hospital need to be identified quickly and accurately upon their arrival at a hospital.

The team found that not only did their model prove especially useful in cases without prior expert knowledge or clinical experiences but that the clinical decision support system also allowed for more accurate identification of trauma patients with adverse events compared to other systems with traditional machine learning models. Furthermore, the clinical decision support system works in a real-time fashion. From a physician's input of a patient's data to generating appropriate advice, the system works almost without any delay, which in turn helps buy trauma patients valuable time.

Next, the researchers plan to finetune their system and to generalize it for use in other clinical areas and non-emergent department settings.

K-State's model of critical infrastructures reveals vulnerabilities

Tyler O'Neal, Staff Editor

An interdisciplinary team of Kansas State University researchers developed a supercomputer simulation that revealed beef supply chain vulnerabilities that need safeguarding -- a realistic concern during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Caterina Scoglio, professor, and Qihui Yang, doctoral student, both in electrical and computer engineering, recently published "Developing an agent-based model to simulate the beef cattle production and transportation in southwest Kansas" in Physica A, an Elsevier journal publication. The beef supply chain and transportation industries are interdependent critical infrastructures and need safeguarding according to a supercomputer simulation model developed by Kansas State University researchers.{module INSIDE STORY}

The paper describes a model of the beef production system and the transportation industry, which are interdependent critical infrastructures -- similar to the electrical grid and computer technology. According to the model, disruptions in the cattle industry -- especially in the beef packing plants -- will affect the transportation industry and together cause great economic harm. The disruptions modeled in the simulation share similarities with how the packing plants have been affected during the COVID-19 pandemic.

"When we first started working on this project, there was a lot of emphasis on studying critical infrastructures; especially ones that are interdependent, meaning that they need to work together with other critical infrastructures," Scoglio said. "The idea is if there is a failure in one of the systems, it can propagate to the other system, increasing the catastrophic effects."

The study included a variety of viewpoints to create a realistic and integrated model of both systems. Co-authors on the paper include Don Gruenbacher, associate professor and department head of electrical and computer engineering; Jessica Heier Stamm, associate professor of industrial and manufacturing systems engineering; Gary Brase, professor of psychological sciences; Scott DeLoach, professor and department head of computer science; and David Amrine, research director of the Beef Cattle Institute.

The researchers used the model to evaluate which supply chain components were more robust and which were not. They determined that packing plants are the most vulnerable. Scoglio said that recent events in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic raise important issues about how to safeguard the system.

"An important message is that after understanding the critical role of these packers, we need to decide how we could protect both them and the people who work there," Scoglio said. "While the plants are a critical infrastructure and need to be protected, taking care of the health of the workers is very important. How can we design a production process that can be flexible and adaptable in an epidemic?"

According to the paper, the beef cattle industry contributes approximately $8.9 billion to the Kansas economy and employs more than 42,000 people in the state. Since trucks are needed to move cattle, any disruption in either cattle production or transportation almost certainly would harm the regional economy, Scoglio said.

"Packers need to be considered as a critical point of a much longer supply chain, which needs specific attention to make sure it will not fail and can continue working," Scoglio said. "Beef packers are a critical infrastructure in the United States."

The project was supported by the National Science Foundation and focused on southwest Kansas, but the researchers acknowledge that cattle come from outside the region and interruptions may have larger national effects.