Abstract: A photonic device which is configured to implement a recurrent neural network via reservoir computing is provided. The device includes a feed portion which mixes an input signal with previously generated and controllably attenuated portions of an output signal. The device further includes one or more propagating stages coupled to the feed portion. Each propagating stage propagates signals through a loop in both clockwise and counterclockwise directions, for example to be affected by nonlinear elements. The arrangement of the photonic device causes a nonlinear activation function to be realized by the propagating stages. The nonlinear activation function may be adjustable by adjusting various controllable elements in the device.

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.

Abstract: A system and a method for phase extraction of a multi-path interferometer, the method comprising generating a reference signal of a coherence length longer than an arm length difference of the multi-path interferometer; splitting the reference signal into a frequency shifted reference signal and an unshifted reference signal; recombining the frequency shifted reference signal and the unshifted reference signal into a polarization- and frequency-multiplexed reference signal, and feeding the polarization- and frequency-multiplexed reference signal to the multi-path interferometer; detecting frequency shifted and unshifted output signals of the multi-path interferometer; and determining the interferometer phase from the detected signal.