ECE 290 Seminar: Speaker Luat T. Vuong – Biospeculative approaches to the “needle in a haystack”: vortex encoders and hybrid optical neural-networks

Presenter: Luat Vuong, Associate Professor in Mechanical Engineering, UC Riverside

Description: Given the growing computational demands of machine learning, how can we scale approaches for sifting through large volumes of data—including patterned or delayed information embedded as “noise”? Many computer vision applications have a strict power budget and demand robust, rapid-response, and even real-time image processing. In this talk, I’ll describe our “biospeculative” approaches to efficiently offload traditional computer vision tasks to diffractive optics. Such hybrid approaches leverage the benefits of preprocessing optics and shallow electronic algorithms. With optics, we spatially encode multiple dimensions of light (color, polarization) and decode with simple, back-end neural networks. I will focus the discussion on the role of encoding from vortex optical singularities. With vortex and multi-vortex encoders, we identify sparse and reconstruct low-signal features, tracking the “needle in a haystack”.

Bio: Luat Vuong is currently Associate Professor in Mechanical Engineering at UC Riverside, with cooperating faculty memberships in Physics, Electrical and Computer, and Materials Science and Engineering. She is also affiliate faculty in Robotics and at the Center for Environmental Research and Technology. She is trained as an optical applied physicist, received her undergrad at UC Berkeley, PhD at Cornell University. She is a recipient of the 2007 Fulbright Fellowship (which she took at the Technical University of Delft in The Netherlands), 2010 European Council MC-IIF Global Postdoctoral Fellowship (which she took at the Institute of Photonic Sciences in Spain), 2012 NSF Career Award, a 2016 J-FRASE, Sloan- funded Award, the 2019 DARPA Young Faculty Award, and the 2021 DARPA Director’s Fellowship. Her research is broadly at the intersection of optics, nonlinear dynamics, and data science.

Hosted by: Professor Soumya Bose, ECE Department

Zoom Link: https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/97975378707?pwd=ljcgaCfhMmhZ88Vt5dqQUBVQRjehOx.1