Bio: Marin Soljacic is a Professor of Physics at MIT. His main research interests are in electromagnetic phenomena, focusing on nanophotonics, and non-linear optics.  He is a co-author of more than 200 scientific articles, more than 100 issued US patents, and he has been invited to give more than 100 invited talks at conferences and universities around the world. He is the recipient of the Adolph Lomb medal from the Optical Society of America (2005), and the TR35 award of the Technology Review magazine (2006). In 2008, he was awarded a MacArthur fellowship “genius” grant. He is an international member of the Croatian Academy of Engineering since 2009. In 2011 he became a Young Global Leader (YGL) of the World Economic Forum. In 2014, he was awarded Blavatnik National Award.

Abstract: The talk will cover two different topics that have been of significant interest to our group lately. In the first part of the talk, I will present a novel class of widely tunable (from THz to X-ray) light sources, based on fast electrons interacting with nanophotonic designs. The second part of the talk will focus on the recent excitement that Deep Learning Neural Networks brought to the field of Artificial Intelligence. I will discuss how nanophotonics can contribute to the development of this exciting field, and I will also present examples how Deep Learning techniques might be useful in nanophotonics design. 

Hosted by ECE and Peter Bermel, pbermel@purdue.edu