Prof. Dr. Birgit Stiller and her team at the Cluster of Excellence PhoenixD at Leibniz University Hannover and the Max-Planck-Institute for the Science of Light in Erlangen are delighted: The physicist and mathematician received a Consolidator Grant from the European Research Council (ERC). Stiller will obtain up to three million euros of funding over the next five years to pursue her research project "Computing with Light and Sound".
"My project tackles the challenge of alternative computing architectures for neuromorphic computing to enhance future machine learning and artificial intelligence approaches", says Prof. Dr. Birgit Stiller, who accepted a professorship at Leibniz University Hannover and joined the PhoenixD board this year. Since 2019, she has headed a Research Group at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light in Erlangen. "We will use light-sound interactions in optical fibers and photonic chips to create versatile neural network structures – optoacoustic neural networks."
With her research, she wants to pave the way for reducing the high energy consumption of current standard computing facilities and data centers. She uses photonics, the science and technology of light, in the form of photons, to achieve this goal. These particles represent a quantum of light. "Photonics comes as a promising solution due to the potential in parallel computation and broad bandwidth", says Stiller. Many research groups, including the different teams of the Cluster of Excellence PhoenixD in Hannover and Braunschweig, work on the optical implementation of neural networks. "Acoustics is a complete novelty in this area and will add flexible and reconfigurable building blocks that will finally bring new functionalities to optical neural networks."
Stiller chose optical fibers or photonic chips for her research because both platforms are highly developed. Optical fibres are omnipresent - they exist now on every street. "Moreover, we will also cross over to the quantum domain and realize several ideas towards quantum neural networks", says Stiller, giving an outlook on her research plans.
"The ERC Consolidator Grant, with its generous funding, allows me and my team to realize this new research approach", says Stiller. "I'm beyond thrilled about this opportunity". She now has the chance to install classical fibre and quantum optics experiments with new high-end equipment, enlarge her research team in Hannover and Erlangen by three PhD students and two postdocs, and offer supervision of Bachelor and Master students' thesis in the fields of neuromorphic computing with light and sound.
With the Consolidator Grants the ERC supports excellent scientists with seven to twelve years of research experience after completing their doctoral degree and an excellent research proposal. This year, the ERC has awarded its Consolidator Grants to 328 researchers, totalling €678 million in funding. Only 328 (14,2 per cent) of the submitted 2,313 applications were able to convince the jury. Germany is particularly successful this year, with 67 projects funded, followed by France and the United Kingdom (38 projects each) and the Netherlands (37 projects). The grants will likely create around 2,750 jobs for postdoctoral fellows, PhD students, and other staff at the different research institutions.
Since its foundation in 2019, five other members of the Cluster of Excellence PhoenixD have received an ERC Grant, namely Michael Kues (Starting Grant), Boris Chichkov (Advanced Grant), Philipp Junker (Consolidator Grant), Andrea Trabattoni (Starting Grant), and PhoenixD's Advisory Committee member Liberato Manna (Advanced Grant). An overview of the ERC winners at LUH is available online here.
