ANN ARBOR, Mich.
The Students chose Toyota Motor North America R&D’s Dr. Sean Rodrigues to share his expertise with the Electro-Optics & Photonics department at the University of Dayton, funding this learning opportunity through the OPTICA Traveling Lecture Program.
Student chapters of the OPTICA Society have an opportunity to invite experts in optics and photonics to share their cutting-edge work with the students with the professional society arranging and funding this learning experience. The students at the University of Dayton were interested to hear what is being done at Toyota Research North America directly from our experts.
Optical processing for machine learning is being reevaluated for its potential to address large power consumption, data shuttling, and thermal dissipation challenges faced by CMOS technology. While photonics has long been speculated as a means to process artificial neural networks, the tools to achieve this goal have far lagged behind the conjectures in the field. Sean’s talk addressed how photonic processing technologies could integrate into the future vehicle. Both through in house research at the Toyota Research Institute of North America and through collaboration with universities, we have begun to evaluate how silicon photonics and metamaterial technology will impact the realm of computing.
