INESC TEC researcher awarded at the European Optical Society Meeting

The work developed by Duarte Silva was acknowledged at the EOSAM 2022 – European Optical Society Annual Meeting, one of the largest international scientific conferences on optics and photonics, promoted by INESC TEC. The researcher is studying the implementation of a specific neuronal network architecture on an optical platform.

Duarte Silva, researcher at INESC TEC’s Centre for Applied Photonics (CAP) received the “Best student oral presentation” award for the paper “Unravelling an Optical Extreme Learning Machine”. The work presents the implementation and research, at a fundamental level, of an architecture of a particular neuronal network (called Extreme Learning Machine) on an optical platform. “One of the major problems of deep neuronal networks is their training, which can lead to large time and energy-consuming processes. With an Extreme Learning Machine, one can solve this issue by performing the training only on the output data, which leads to a very fast and efficient optimisation”, explained the researcher.

“In addition, doing so in the optical domain allows us to achieve extremely fast computing with low energy consumption and high parallelism. Finally, and due to the simplicity of said implementation, it can be easily replicated, particularly relevant to the processing of information already conveyed by optical methods”, added Duarte Silva.

This work was developed within the scope of his master’s thesis, at the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Porto (FCUP), under the scientific guidance of Ariel Guerreiro, researcher at INESC TEC and professor at FCUP. The work also included the contribution of researchers Nuno Silva and Tiago Ferreira.

The EOSAM 2022 – European Optical Society Annual Meeting took place at the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto, between September 12 and 16, 2022.

The INESC TEC researcher mentioned in this news piece is associated with INESC TEC and UP-FCUP.