Researchers from the Optical Networks Group win best paper award

Congratulations to past and present Optical Networks Group members - Dr Boris Karanov, Dr Domanic Lavery and Professor Polina Bayvel - on their winning publication ‘End-to-End Deep Learning of Optical Fiber Communications’ which reconsiders how optical fibre communication systems are designed using artificial neural networks. This is the third time in four years that members of the Optical Networks Group have won the award.

The team share the JLT best paper accolade with collaborators from Nokia Bell Labs, Georgia Institute of Technology and the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology, Tokyo. The award will be presented to all co-authors at the 2021 Optical Networking and Communication Conference later this year.

Boris Karanov, first author on the paper and Optical Networks Group alumnus, said:

“To receive the Best Paper Award from the flagship journal in our community is fantastic recognition for our work – it’s a great honour! I believe this work to be an important contribution to the development of AI in optical networks. The outcome is efficient, reconfigurable and versatile transceivers which exploit the potential for high-speed data transmission over optical fibres to a greater extent.”

Professor Polina Bayvel, Head of the Optical Networks Group and Co-Director of the Institute of Communications and Connected Systems said:

“We are extremely proud of Boris Karanov and colleagues, and honoured that researchers from the Optical Networks Group are winning this award for an incredible third time, all working in different aspects of optical communications.”

The JLT Best Paper Award is given annually by JLT's Steering and Coordinating Committee to the top-cited original papers published in the journal two to three years prior to the award. The 2021 award considers all original papers published in the Journal of Lightwave Technology in 2018.

Paper 

End-to-End Deep Learning of Optical Fiber Communications
Boris Karanov, Mathieu Chagnon, Félix Thouin, Tobias A. Eriksson, Henning Bülow, Domaniç Lavery, Polina Bayvel and Laurent Schmalen
Journal of Lightwave Technology
doi.org/10.1109/JLT.2018.2865109

Links 

Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering
Optical Networks Group
Institute of Communications and Connected Systems  
Journal of Lightwave Technology
JLT Best Paper Award

Notes

Boris Karanov was a member of the Optical Networks Group from 2016 to 2020, completing his PhD under the supervision of Professor Polina Bayvel. He is now part of the ICT Lab at Eindhoven University of Technology.  

Domanic Lavery joined the Optical Networks Group as a PhD student in 2009 and went on to achieve a lectureship and a Royal Academy of Engineering Research Fellowship in 2016. He is now a Systems Design Engineer at Infinera and an Honorary Senior Research Fellow at UCL.