Optical Computing

The course will explore the use  of optics in computation. The inherent advantage of light over electronic for communicating information has been realised in fibre optics networks  for telecommunications. Optical interconnections are also used in some computing systems replacing wires. A complete optical computer requires also the equivalent of transistors to carry out the nonlinearity essential for logic or decision making and therefore an optical computer needs to include nonlinear devices, either of optical or electronic origin. Optical computing has received a lot of attention recently because of the explosion of machine learning and neural networks which require dense connectivity, making these systems well matched to optics. In this course we will start with a brief history of optical computing, describe methods for implementing optical interconnection and logic and then spend most of our time on learning about the recent efforts in optical computing machines for machine learning.