2023 Symposia – Optica Foundation Challenge – Information

Use Photonics. Change the World: Information Symposium

Modern humanity and the global economy rely on optical infrastructures and technologies to drive our digital society. We will continue to see exponential data traffic. The cost of this growth in communications draws a significant fraction of the energy society uses. New, more energy-efficient approaches and technologies must be developed and adapted to permit continued information growth. Our information and communications lifeline demands innovation and game-changing discoveries to keep up.

The 2022 winners of the Optica Foundation Challenge in the information category will present their progress along with a special keynote.

Keynote Speakers

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  Dirk Englund

  MIT, USA

  Compiling Deep Learning Tasks onto (Quantum-) Optical Systems

  The hardware limitations of conventional electronics in deep neural network (DNN) applications have spurred exploration into alternative architectures, including optical accelerators. This work investigates the scalability and performance metrics—such as throughput, energy consumption, and latency—of various optical and opto-electronic architectures, with a focus on recently developed hardware error correction techniques, in-situ training methods, initial field trials, as well as extensions into DNN-based inference on quantum signals with reversible, quantum-coherent resources.