A few years ago, I secured a scholarship to pursue a PhD in Photonics modelling. Modelling and optimization of optical/photonics waveguides are very important for many upcoming applications, like optical waveguides used for guiding light in Augmented Reality applications. Seeing such cool applications motivated me a lot to start my PhD journey.

Like any other PhD researcher, I went to one place where everyone goes when they are not sure what they are looking for and how to find what they are looking for. Yes, you guessed it right — GOOGLE!!

Luckily for me, I already knew that I was looking for some sort of open-source codes/libraries or commercial software to get my hands dirty with photonics modelling applications.

To my surprise what I found…

• Commercial softwares- **Comsol/Lumerical **were expensive for me to buy at that time, and I was not sure to even ask my supervisor to buy as I was not sure which one I will need.
• **Open-source libraries- **There are some open-source libraries like **Meep, **but I think we need to have more. **Google, Facebook, Microsoft **all adopting this new trend of making their technologies open source for all to learn. But are the big companies in the optical modelling domain ready to go open-source?
• Fortran- I never bothered to learn about Fortran during my Bachelor’s, in fact, I can say that I chose not to hear or learn about Fortran as it was such an outdated language. The syntax is bad, no in-build plotting library, among other problems. G_uess what? People still use it because it is fast and a lot of codes which are still being used were written in Fortran. _But still Fortran…
• No optical engineers/scientists community- This **hurted **me the most. I couldn’t find any blog/website where optical engineer come and share their work and experiences regularly. Till date, I am looking for such websites sharing regular traffic where people talk about photonics (Let me know if you know any such place!).

Machine Learning- the Buzz word…

If you are reading this then there is a good chance that you have heard about today’s technologies buzz words-

Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Deep Learning

_Everyone is talking about it. Every new company is using it or wanting to use it. It doesn’t matter whether they need it or not, but they want to use it. Or atleast show that they are up to date with new technologies and making our life easier and better. _I guess it is good marketing as well!!

Having heard these buzz words several times from Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Tim Cook, I thought there is no harm in looking for what exactly is this machine learning?

What the hell is machine learning? Then I understood machine learning is actually statistics plus a lot of other things.

#photonics #optics #machine-learning #electronics #optical #deep learning