Professor Lee founded the Jacobs School's Photonics/Opto-Electronics Program, which has grown to include 13 faculty members. Its rich research portfolio covers a wide range of challenges from micromechanical devices, biophotonics, sensor networks and other micro and nano-scale technologies as well as wide-area technologies such as grid computing and telecommunications backbones. Artificial intelligence is another distributed computing niche where Lee has worked. He helped establish the Institute for Neural Computation, and is a pioneer in applying optics to brain-mimicking neural computing. In neural networks, decisions are based on the state of interconnections between rudimentary computational nodes dubbed neurons. In such a system, the more neurons the greater the computational capacity. A complication is that the quantity of potential interconnections is exponential to the number of neurons. Lee's increasing focus is on developing new fabrication techniques leveraging and improving techniques made pervasive in electronics. This is a natural interest since components for photonics such as waveguides, lenses, mirrors, and lasers must be sized to operate at the submicron scales of light wavelengths. His grayscale lithography and packaging technologies hold promise for bringing down the costs of photonic-, micromechanical-, and electronic-based systems as well as systems that integrate all three.
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