Abstract: An optical information processing system comprising a nonlinear element selected in relation to input optical pulses to initiate nonlinear optical frequency conversion and a detection unit, the nonlinear element receiving encoded information input in form of pulsed light, pulsed light from the nonlinear element being read-out by the detection unit for spectro-temporal feature extraction, and the readout being used to train the system on a specific target to obtain a task-specific output or re-directed to the nonlinear element to obtain an input-dependent output, yielding processed information comprising selective positions in an output of the system. A method for training an optical system comprises, for each individual optical input information, reading specific optical amplitude or phase features from specific output bins of the system in time or frequency, weighting and evaluating the specific features towards optimizing user-defined fitness function to identify, classify, or fit the input information.

Abstract: A method and a system for arbitrary optical waveform generation from an optical input, the system comprising an optical shaper comprising unbalanced interferometers with at least one delay, the delay being selected of at least 0.1 ps, an optical sampling readout selected for measuring optical waveforms of at least 0.

Abstract: A system for designing a photonics system, comprising a topology optimization module and a component parameter optimization module; wherein the topology optimization module searches candidate photonics systems through photonics combinations of component; and the component parameter optimization module searches for component parameters of the candidate photonics systems to simulate successive candidate photonics systems in a desired degree-of-freedom according to a target characteristic of the photonics system. The method comprises searching through different photonics combinations of components and component parameters and selecting candidate photonics systems, and searching component parameters of the candidate photonics systems in a desired degree-of-freedom according to a target characteristic of the photonics system.