Grant: Strategic Projects - Group

Industry and academia are working on creating new 'smart' services to enable applications such as self-driving cars, computer vision and medical diagnosis. These services depend on machine learning concepts for creating devices that can display intelligent behavior similar to humans. Reservoir comput(ing/ers) (RC) is a new approach that works in a fundamentally different way from electronic processors in laptops/smartphones. Making use of system dynamics, RCs can be trained to recognize and give specific outputs in response to different input signals. This allows them to act as analog computers that can perform tasks such as signal classification, time-series prediction and audio/visual recognition. The goal of this project is to develop a novel type of compact and energy-efficient optical RC platform, utilizing the nonlinear dynamics of microresonator frequency combs, and capable of processing data at the speed of light. Our research team will, together with our three industrial partners (TeraXion, 'E' Machine Learning and Novacam Technologies): (i) exploit RC for high-speed data restoration and noiseless amplification. Additionally, we will (ii) apply RC for processing in an inexpensive light detection and ranging (LIDAR) system. Lastly, we will (iii) apply our platform to real-time optical coherence tomography (OCT), which is a computationally-demanding imaging technique used in, e.g., retinal profiling and surgical guidance. The project will contribute to the long-term vision of incorporating machine-learning methods into optical signal processing systems. This in turn will allow ultrafast computation at unprecedented data rates (~1 THz) using photonic chips, directly compatible with smart sensors and the emerging Internet of Things. The project will also benefit the Canadian workforce, via the training of highly-qualified personnel with multidisciplinary expertise in optics research, multimedia processing and machine learning. The commercialization of our technology will promote the growth of Canadian industries, across numerous high-tech sectors such as telecommunications, health and human-machine interaction.