Dr. Sorger wins $1.1 million NSA/Army Research Office grant

ECE associate professor Dr. Volker Sorger has been awarded a three-year, $1.1 million grant from the National Security Agency/Army Research Office for the project “Fourier Optics Multiplication Accelerator for Convolutional Neural Networks and Cryptographic Applications. The research team includes ECE professor Dr. Tarek El-Ghazawi as co-principal investigator, and ECE research professors Dr. Mario Miscuglio and Dr. Yousra Alkabani. The team’s aim is to develop an ultra-fast photonic multiplier processor that can revolutionize applications such as public key cryptography, which is an encryption technique and key algorithm for secure data communication. The team will pioneer and build a processing system that, when scaled up, can handle up to 1 Peta operation (1 million x 1 billion operations) per second while requiring just a fraction of the power used by current systems. This grant brings the team’s four-year total funding in photonic computing to approximately $8 million.