Cornell University is leading a $7.5 million research project to test whether light can perform some of the image-processing work now done by electronic computers. The federally supported effort aims to establish the scientific foundations for hybrid optical-electronic systems, Cornell announced.
Francesco Monticone, an associate professor in Cornell's School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, leads the project, called “Deep Nanophotonic Inference Systems.” It is funded through the U.S. Department of Defense's Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative.
The research concerns visual inference: turning information captured by cameras and other sensors into useful conclusions. That work is increasingly performed with artificial intelligence running on digital processors, which can demand substantial computing power and energy.
Monticone's team will investigate whether specially designed optical structures can handle part of that work as light passes through them. Electronics would still be involved. The goal is to determine what such a combined system can do before trying to optimize it for real-world use.
Three research questions
The first part of the project will examine the physical and information-theoretical limits of nanophotonic systems. Researchers want to know which visual tasks light-based structures could perform and where conventional electronics remain necessary.
A second effort will develop ways to simulate, design and fabricate three-dimensional nanophotonic structures. A third will study how optical hardware and digital algorithms can be designed together as one system, rather than treating one as an add-on to the other.
Potential applications include autonomous driving, navigation guided by cameras, adaptive sensing and biomedical imaging. Cornell described those as possible uses of future technology, not demonstrated outcomes of this new project.
Researchers at Stanford University, the University of Pennsylvania, Vanderbilt University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are co-principal investigators. International collaborators are at Sorbonne University and Lund University.
Related work on changing materials
Some platforms the team will study use metamaterials, engineered structures that control waves in ways ordinary materials do not. Monticone is also a co-principal investigator on a separate Defense Department initiative led by the University of Pennsylvania, “N-Dimensional Space-Time Metamaterials.”
That second project examines materials whose properties change rapidly over time as well as across space. Researchers hope the added design dimension will allow new ways to control light, radio waves and sound, with possible uses in communications, radar, sensing and quantum photonics.
For the Cornell-led visual-computing project, the immediate work is more fundamental: establish what optical computing can achieve, build structures to test those limits and measure how they perform alongside digital systems.
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