The industry’s most innovative people 2024 Felix Heide


Organisation: Algolux Role: Co-Founder and CTO


“I want to turn cameras into ‘optical computers’ that can compute in addition to sensing at the speed of light,” says Felix Heide of his research priorities for the coming year. The co-founder and CTO of Algolux cites as one of his proudest moments the development of neural nano-optics, which received significant coverage around the world. While carrying out recent research into metasurface optics (https://arxiv.org/ abs/2308.02797), “it seems we stumbled on an entirely new design space that was previously limited to specific bands. We got this to work in the broad band finally.”


Fotini Karinou


Organisation: Microsoſt Research Cambridge


Role: Principal Researcher


“It’s an exciting time to work in photonics to build systems for the sustainable cloud, with a goal of empowering the widest number of people, now and in the future,” says Fotini Karinou, Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research Cambridge Lab. Karinou is developing novel optical


technologies for sustainable next- generation cloud computing systems and networks. Before joining Microsoft, she was a Senior R&D Engineer at Huawei Technologies, where she worked on the R&D of optical transmission systems and networks for datacom, metro/access,


Based in: Cambridge, UK


Education: PhD, Optical Communications, University of Patras


long-haul and quantum networking. She has authored and co-authored about 100 publications in the most prestigious optical communications technology journals and conferences (IEEE/Optica), several reporting record-setting results, and cites as one of her proudest moments co- chairing the Optical Fibre Communication conference in 2023. Karinou says that meeting bandwidth demands in an energy-efficient manner in the artificial intelligence/machine learning era is one of the biggest challenges to the industry over the coming years.


Georg Böcherer


Organisation: Huawei Technologies Role: Principal Engineer


Georg Böcherer, Principal Engineer at Huawei Technologies, believes using neuromorphic computing to lower the power consumption of DSP ASICs (digital signal processing application-specific integrated circuits) in optical transceivers will have a huge impact. Neuromorphic computing, inspired by the structures and functions of the human brain, “will allow the development of competitive DSP ASICS using more mature CMOS nodes, dramatically lowering the R&D and manufacturing costs,” Böcherer says of his current work. Although the DSP ASIC has been


Based in: Munich, Germany Education: PhD, RWTH Aachen University


optimised over decades, he says it still “came as a big surprise to us when we realised the untapped potential of making the DSP ASIC more efficient by moving to neuromorphic computing”. In other areas of photonics, Böcherer cites


huge progress in photonic integrated circuits (PICs) and photonic computing and believes the impact will be enormous. However, he says the photonics industry


faces the threat of not finding enough highly skilled workers. “To overcome this challenge, investments in education and facilitating immigration are required,” Böcherer told us.


Based in: New York, NY, US Education: Postdoc from Stanford University


He believes metasurface optics are the most significant photonics technology of the past 12 months: “I am excited… as we found they can implement optical neural networks (https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.03407).” On challenges facing the industry, Heide


says reaching scalability in autonomous driving without supervised data will require innovation on the simulation side: "Neural rendering methods and generative AI have a big potential to help us solve this challenge." Looking forward, he thinks we will see


integrated designs that combine optics and sensors: “Think of a lens integrated into the cover glass of a sensor.”


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