The National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) tasks our team to develop whale safe fishing gear to prevent whale entanglements due to the fishing lines. The entanglements entail losing parts of the whales' bodies and eventually, their deaths. With the unusual amount of whale entanglements due to in 2016, the fishery faces strict regulations that impact the fishermen's livelihood. Keeping in mind of the necessity to create cost-effective devices, our team focuses on two different aspects of the solution: prevention and fail-safe.

GreeNN is an optical neural network designed with the goal of reducing the carbon footprint of image classification. Increasing the complexity of computations for image classification in traditional silicon based hardware is associated with a significant energy cost. The team’s solution implements the most computationally intensive task of image classification in free space optics with high energy efficiency. The setup encodes an image onto a green laser beam using a digital micromirror device and performs a convolution calculation on a spatial light modulator.