The industry’s most innovative people 2024 Viacheslav Artyushenko


Organisation: Art Photonics Role: Founder and President


“Too much effort and money is invested into military projects,” says Viacheslav Artyushenko, Founder and President of fibre optics supplier Art Photonics, “instead of products focused on our lives, including healthier food and better medicine". Artyushenko is working on fibre photonics solutions for applications such as remote fibre spectroscopy for process-control in-line, medical diagnostics, mid-IR-fibre imaging, and the flexible delivery of laser power for laser medicine and technology. He aims to replace expensive and bulky process-spectroscopy fibre systems by


Xianxin Guo


Organisation: Lumai Role: Co-Found and Head of Research Based in: Oxford, UK


Xianxin Guo, Head of Research at Oxford University spin-out Lumai, is developing scalable optical computing and optical machine learning technologies to accelerate artificial intelligence (AI) and high- performance computing. “AI is extremely power-hungry and


the requirement of computing power is exploding, which conventional digital electronics is struggling to keep up with," Guo says. "Photonics is a promising solution due to its ultra-fast clock, ultra-high energy efficiency, and a vast amount of parallelisms.” Guo adds that photonic chips for quantum


Education: PhD, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology


processing and machine learning must be significantly scaled up to deliver ultra-high computing speeds. “One of the biggest challenges is to


overcome the scalability bottleneck of photonic chips… This scalability is severely limited by fabrication imperfections, component cross-talk, footprint and electronic controls,” he says. “Some of these [factors] can be partially addressed by developing efficient error-correction algorithms and calibration procedures. New photonic modulation mechanisms suitable for quantum tasks or AI applications must be developed.”


Yichen Shen


Organisation: Lightelligence Role: CEO, Founder


Lightelligence is an MIT spinout using photonics to reinvent computing for artificial intelligence. Yichen Shen, its founder and CEO, received his PhD degree in Physics in 2016 from MIT, where his research focused on nanophotonics and artificial intelligence. The company launched its first fully


integrated optical computing platform PACE (Photonic Arithmetic Computing Engine) in 2021. PACE leverages the inherent properties of light to generate optimal solutions to the Ising, Max-Cut, and Min-Cut problems over 800 times faster than current high-end GPUs while maintaining high throughput, low latency, and energy efficiency.


Based in: Cambridge, Massachusetts, US


Education: PhD, Applied Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology


Shen has filed 20 US patents and has published 40 peer-reviewed journal papers, including first authored papers in Science, Nature Photonics, and the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML). Yichen has also been honoured as a Forbes 30 Under 30 and MIT Technology Review 35 Innovators Under 35. In an interview with MIT News in 2021, Shen said: “We’re changing the fundamental way computing is done, and I think we’re doing it at the right time in history. We believe optics will be the next computing platform, at least for linear operations like AI.”


Based in: Berlin, Germany Education: PhD in Physics


transferring data regarding chemical reactors, environmental pollution, human bodies and more to the cloud. He says this approach will lead to a revolution in common spectroscopy analysis, as it will eliminate the need to collect, prepare, and test "dead" samples. “This new ‘live’ fibre spectroscopy,”


Artyushenko says, “will enable remote monitoring of any media composition, with results delivered in real-time to your gadget, or enable the automatisation of industrial processes and medical diagnostics using AI.”


52 Photonics100 2024


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48  |  Page 49  |  Page 50  |  Page 51  |  Page 52  |  Page 53  |  Page 54  |  Page 55  |  Page 56