Congratulations to Joshua Baxter for winning a NSERC Vanier CGS. For more information on this scholarship, please see the Vanier Scholarship website.
Photonics and AI session at Photonics North 2020
This year, the Photonics North conference (May 26-28, 2020) introduced for the first time a session on “Photonics and AI” organized and chaired by Lora Ramunno, Antonio Calà Lesina and Mario Krenn (University of Toronto and Vector Institute). The session was very successful and featured two keynote talks (Marin Soljacic, MIT and Aydogan Ozcan, UCLA) and 9 invited talks: James Pond (Lumerical Ansys), Sean Molesky (Princeton University), Fabio Sciarrino (Sapienza University of Rome), Dan-Xia Xu (NRC Canada), Bhavin Shastri (Queen’s University), and many others
Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light Annual Meeting
Last week (October 29 – 31 ), Lora, Antonio, and Joshua traveled to Erlangen, Germany to participate in the annual meeting for the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light. Talks were given from research in the institute on their work and collaborations. Antonio presented his work on metasurfaces, and Lora presented an overview of the rest of the group’s work, from nonlinear metasurface calculations, to deep learning and inverse design. For more details of the event, check out the institute’s website.
AI for Design
Yesterday, the Ramunno group participated in the AI for design conference held at the National Research Council. Lora gave a talk outlining the group’s work in using deep learning for inverse design in nanophotonics and our future goals. Talks were given on applying AI to biological/medical research, material science, and photonics. For more information on the AI for Design Challenge Program, check out the NRC website .
Nanophotonics Summer School 2019
The Ramunno group traveled to Erice, Sicily for the NATO Advanced Study Institute titled “Light-Matter Interactions Towards the Nanoscale” from July 20th to August 4th 2019. This year’s organizers included our very own research associate Antonino Calà Lesina. Many lecturers presented on various nanophotonic-related topics, including Prof. Ramunno who gave a workshop on Lumerical’s FDTD software. Joshua presented some of his work as a short seminar, and two posters.
NUSOD Conference
Last week (July 8-12 2019) the Ramunno group participated in the NUSOD conference for simulations in optoelectronics. Prof. Ramunno chaired the first session on Novel Methods and gave an invited talk titled Simulation of nanophotonic nonlinear metasurfaces. Joshua Baxter gave a talk titled Deep Learning applied to plasmonic colouring. Antonio Calà Lesina led the Rump session in discussing the use of machine learning in optoelectronics.
The conference was lots of fun with amazing talks, a breathtaking excursion, and some excellent food.
Plasmonics goes mainstream in The Globe and Mail
This past weekend, The Globe and Mail published an article about the Royal Canadian Mint’s use of plasmonic colouring called The colour of money: How the Royal Canadian Mint is using cutting-edge laser technology to give coins a surprising new look. The article highly features our close collaborator Dr. Jean-Michel Guay. Congrats Jean-Michel!
For more information on the plasmonic colouring, please read the articlepublished in Nature Communications coauthored by Antonio Calà Lesina and Prof. Ramunno.
We’re going to the NATO Advanced Study Institute on Nanophotonics
Our group is going to be at the NATO Advanced Study Institute on “Light-matter interactions towards the nanoscale” from July 20 to August 4, 2019, in Erice, Italy.
The program is part of the School of Atomic and Molecular Spectroscopy, a prestigious school directed by Prof. Baldassare Di Bartolo since 1973.
The program this year is directed by Prof. J. Collins and Prof. S. Gaponenko.
During the summer school, Prof. Ramunno will give a series of lectures on Computational Nanophotonics, Joshua Baxter will give a poster and a short seminar on our recent research activities, while Dr. Calà Lesina is part of the organizing team.
For more info: please visit the website and check out the poster.
Book Review in Optics and Photonics News
“Quantum Nano-Photonics” is a collection of articles from the NATO Advanced Study Institute which took place in the summer of 2017, where we contibuted Chapter 6 on simulations in nanophotonics based on the lectures presented by Prof Ramunno, as well as a number of proceedings articles.
This book was just given a wonderful review in OSA’s Optics and Photonics News May 2019 issue.
CLEO Presentation
PhD candidate Joshua Baxter will be presenting his talk Application of deep learning to direct and inverse problems in plasmonic coloring at CLEO on May 7th at 6:15 in the “Nanophotonic Platforms for Optical Computing & Deep Learning” session.
