Abstract: Nano-optical devices provide a new way to control light at the subwavelength scale, enabling optical functionalities beyond conventional optics. By engineering the nanostructures, we can tailor the optical response as a function of space, polarization, wavelength, and angle of incidence — effectively turning the optical front end into a controllable, programmable physical layer. This creates an interesting interplay between optical design and computation: on one hand, nanooptics can be incorporated and co-designed within the computational pipeline, enabling new approaches to smart sensing, imaging, and display; on the other hand, computational methods can be used to discover and optimize new classes of optical instruments that go beyond intuitive, hand designed architectures.

In this talk, I will first introduce the basics of nanooptics, highlighting key opportunities and current limitations. I will then present several concrete examples: nanooptics for depth sensing, polarization imaging, and nanooptics-based new AR display architectures. I will conclude with a view of what it would take to make these systems robust and scalable, and where collaboration with the computer vision community can have the most impact.

Bio: Zhujun Shi is an Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Pittsburgh. Her group explores new frontiers in light manipulation using nanophotonics. Prior to joining Pitt, she was a research scientist at Meta Reality Labs. She received her B.S. in Physics from Tsinghua University in 2015 and her Ph.D. in Physics from Harvard University in 2020.

Homepage:  https://www.shiphotonics.org/

Sponsor

The VASC seminar is generously sponsored by HeyGen, an all-in-one AI-powered video generation platform that leverages advances in computer vision, generative modeling, and multimodal learning to make high-quality video creation both scalable and accessible.