The Meeting of Light and Intelligence

As artificial intelligence revolutionizes our lives, it faces increasing hardware challenges related to speed, power consumption, and data bottlenecks. This talk explores how recent advances in photonic integrated circuits can address these problems. I will first overview the opportunities and challenges of using light for computation, from enhancing communication within AI clusters to enabling all-optical computing. I will then shift focus to the reciprocal relationship, demonstrating how advances in AI are poised to enable the next generation of photonic technologies. I will present examples of substantial photonic design challenges—across applications from sensing to communication and computing—that are becoming solvable through the power of advanced AI tools.

Bio

Alireza Marandi is a Professor of Electrical Engineering and Applied Physics at Caltech. He received his PhD from Stanford University in 2013. Before joining Caltech, he held positions as a postdoctoral scholar and a research engineer at Stanford, a visiting scientist at the National Institute of Informatics in Japan, and a senior engineer in the Advanced Technology Group of Dolby Laboratories. Marandi is a Senior Member of OSA and IEEE and has been the recipient of NSF CAREER award, the AFOSR YIP award, ARO Early Career Award, DARPA Young Faculty Award, and the Young Scientist Prize of the IUPAP. He is named the 2019 KNI-Wheatley Scholar and a 2023 Sloan Foundation Fellow. Marandi is a co-founder and a member of board of directors of PINC Technologies Inc., which is a startup company in Pasadena developing photonic integrated nonlinear circuits.