CEMSE Weekly Updates - October 21, 2025 Tue, Oct 21 2025 Newsletter Upcoming Events Stay informed about the upcoming events and the latest news from CEMSE. Integrated Silicon Photonics with Quantum Dot On-Chip Lasers Yating Wan, Assistant Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering Oct 26, 12:00 - 13:00 B9, L2, R2325 Integrated silicon photonic has emerged as a leading solution for scalable, power-efficient, and environmentally friendly applications. This talk will focus on the prospects and applications of on-chip lasers, a critical component driving the advancement of photonic integrated circuits (PICs). We will discuss various approaches to integrating lasers on silicon and their applications in optical communication, computing, and LiDAR, with a particular emphasis on heterogeneous integration of quantum dot (QD) lasers. QD lasers offer unique advantages, including high immunity to reflection, superior thermal stability, low threshold, and long-term reliability, making them ideal for high-speed optical interconnects, AI-driven computing, and quantum photonic systems. By leveraging the defect tolerance and temperature resilience of QDs, we achieve high-performance, energy-efficient integration with silicon photonics. This talk will highlight recent breakthroughs in QD-on-silicon integration, performance optimizations, and future directions toward heterogeneous photonic systems, paving the way for a new generation of high-speed, low-energy, and scalable optical circuits for next-generation applications. Collective Behaviors - From Traffic Congestion to Chase-and-Escape Toru Ohira, Professor, Dean of the Graduate School of Mathematics, Nagoya University, Japan Oct 26, 14:30 - 15:30 B5 L5 R5220 Mathematical modeling In this lecture, we introduce representative mathematical models of collective motion, showing how they capture unexpected emergent patterns and discuss chase-and-escape dynamics, a classic topic in mathematical modeling. BiCoLoR: Communication-Efficient Optimization with Bidirectional Compression and Local Training Laurent Condat, Senior Research Scientist, Computer Science Oct 27, 12:00 - 13:00 B9 L2 R2325 optimization Distributed algorithms Signal and Image Processing We introduce BiCoLoR, the first algorithm to combine local training with bidirectional compression using arbitrary unbiased compressors, achieving accelerated complexity and demonstrating superior empirical performance. Ringleader ASGD: The First Asynchronous SGD with Optimal Time Complexity under Data Heterogeneity Arto Maranjyan, Ph.D. Student, Computer Science Oct 28, 14:30 - 15:30 B1 L3 R3119 This talk introduces Ringleader ASGD, the first asynchronous SGD algorithm that attains the theoretical lower bounds for parallel first-order stochastic methods in the smooth nonconvex regime, thereby achieving optimal time complexity under data heterogeneity and without restrictive similarity assumptions. Accelerating Branch-and-Bound Graph Algorithms with GPUs Izzat El Hajj, Assistant Professor, Computer Science, American University of Beirut Oct 30, 12:00 - 13:00 B9 L2 R2325 This talk presents multiple techniques that we have developed to load balance the search tree traversal on GPUs and mitigate the strain on memory capacity and bandwidth. On Computation and Robustness Issues in Spatial Statistics Sihan Chen, Ph.D. Student, Statistics Oct 30, 14:30 - 16:30 B2, L5, R5220 robust spatial inference computational methods spatial statistics This thesis develops and evaluates robust statistical methods for the analysis and modeling of spatial data, with a focus on improving inference reliability in the presence of outliers and computational challenges.
