Online Training of an Opto-Electronic Reservoir Computer

Reservoir Computing is a bio-inspired computing paradigm for processing time dependent signals. Its analog implementations equal and sometimes outperform other digital algorithms on a series of benchmark tasks. Their performance can be increased by switching from offline to online training method. Here we present the first online trained opto-electronic reservoir computer. The system is tested on a channel equalisation task and the algorithm is executed by an FPGA chip. We report performances close to previous implementations and demonstrate the benefits of online training on a non-stationary task that could not be easily solved using offline methods.