Athena Seminar Series: Next generation ML-driven highspeed optical networks with quantum and sensing services

Optical networks form the backbone of today's high-speed internet, supporting a wide range of applications including LLMs, online streaming, and 5G communications. Developing accurate digital twins of such networks enables high-speed, intelligent, and scalable autonomous network control. Cascaded learning has been proposed to address the error accumulation problem arising from the cascading of each individual component model. Fiber sensing extends traditional mesh networks into distributed, city-scale sensing infrastructures, while quantum networks provide secure data transmission. Coexistence experiments demonstrate that emerging sensing and quantum services can seamlessly co-propagate with conventional high-speed data traffic, leading to a substantial reduction in the costs of new infrastructure deployment.