In this webinar hosted by the Nanophotonics Technical Group, Arka Majumdar will present his work on phase-change material based ultra-low power nonvolatile switches, which can provide the reconfigurability needed for optical neural networks. Additionally, Prof. Majumdar will discuss a new architecture that utilizes a single electrical to optical conversion by designing a free-space optical frontend unit that implements the linear operations of the first layer with the subsequent layers realized electronically. They found that by intelligently designing the meta-optical frontend, they can improve the classification accuracy while minimizing power consumption and latency over a fully electronic neural network. Such hybrid optical-digital systems can not only implement optical neural networks but can also improve the quality of images captured via meta-optics. Finally, Prof. Majumdar will discuss ways the nonlinear activation can be implemented in the optical domain.

Subject Matter Level: Intermediate - Assumes basic knowledge of the topic

What You Will Learn:

• Optical neural network
• Phase-change material based ultra-low power nonvolatile switches
• Meta-optics

Who Should Attend:

• Undergraduate students interested in practical applications of optics
• Graduate students and postdoctoral researchers in the field of nanophotonics
• Researchers who wish to keep up with the latest optical nanotechnology

About The Presenter: Arka Majumdar, University of Washington 

Arka Majumdar is an Associate Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering and Physics departments at University of Washington (UW). He received B. Tech. from IIT-Kharagpur (2007), where he was honored with the President’s Gold Medal. He completed his MS (2009) and Ph.D. (2012) in Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. He spent one year at University of California, Berkeley (2012-13), and then in Intel Labs (2013-14) as postdocs before joining UW. His research interests include developing a hybrid nanophotonic platform using emerging material systems for optical information science, and imaging. He is recipient of Young Investigator Awards from the AFOSR (2015), ONR (2020), NSF (2019) and DARPA (2021), Intel (2015), Amazon Catalyst Award (2016), Alfred P. Sloan fellowship (2018), UW college of engineering outstanding junior faculty award (2020) and iCANX Young Scientist Award (2021). He is co-founder of Tunoptix, a startup commercializing software defined meta-optics.