Events
Colloquium
Co-design of Optics and Inference
 |
Speaker: Steven Johnson (MIT) Professor of Applied Mathematics and Physics Massachusetts Institute of Technology Wednesday, December 3, 2025 11:30AM - 1:00PM Lunch at 11:30am in 1307
Talk 12:00-1:00pm in 1327 Location: Yale Institute for Foundations of Data Science, Kline Tower 13th Floor, Room 1327, New Haven, CT 06511 and via Webcast: https://yale.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=06fbe227-2f71-4cf0-99ff-b39900f04b93 |
Abstract: Over the past two decades, an explosion in fabrication capabilities for nano-structured optics has coincided with the development of powerful techniques for “inverse design” — large-scale PDE-constrained optimization, sometimes with millions of degrees of freedom, that reveals surprising irregular structures for a diverse range of devices. Light emission, sensing, communications, and imaging have all begun to exploit rich subwavelength scattering physics with the aid of these techniques. But more than simply applying more computing power, inverse design has pushed mathematical formulations of engineering design to the forefront: tractable reformulations of device objectives, new convexifications to obtain useful bounds on performance, algorithms to incorporate manufacturing constraints, and more. More recently, a new design frontier has emerged in which the desired optical outputs are not even specified in advance. Instead, one targets the information that is to be extracted by a subsequent computational inference (such as regularized regression or even neural networks), and the optical device is co-optimized “end-to-end” along with the image processing/inference to maximize accuracy in the presence of noise. Building on pioneering work by multiple groups, the development of fullwave meta-optic end-to-end algorithms is allowing researchers to exploit the extreme polarization, direction, and wavelength sensitivity possible in subwavelength structures, in order to obtain radically new designs for problems in hyper-spectral imaging, depth sensing, polarization sensing, thermal imaging, spectroscopy, and other challenges on the horizons of optics and sensing.
Speaker Bio: Steven G. Johnson is a Professor of Applied Mathematics and Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he joined the faculty in 2004. He received his Ph.D. in physics from MIT in 2001, where he was also an undergraduate student (receiving B.S. degrees in physics, mathematics, and EECS in 1995). He works on the influence of complex geometries (particularly in the nanoscale) on the solutions of partial differential equations, especially for wave phenomena and electromagnetism. This includes analytical theory, numerics, and inverse design of devices and phenomena. He is also known more generally for his work in computational science, such as his development of the FFTW fast Fourier transform library (for which he co-received the 1999 J. H. Wilkinson Prize for Numerical Software) and the Meep and MPB software for electromagnetic simulation.
Add To: Google Calendar | Outlook | iCal File
- Colloquium
Submit an Event
Interested in creating your own event, or have an event to share? Please fill the form if you’d like to send us an event you’d like to have added to the calendar.