Friday 30 October 2026 4:00pm to 5:00pm
Cambridge Graphene Centre Seminar Room, Electrical Engineering Division, 9 JJ Thomson Avenue.
This talk explores how Microsoft Research is rethinking AI infrastructure through optical networking, energy-efficient optical computing and robotics, highlighting the multidisciplinary approaches needed for scalable and sustainable AI systems.
About
The rapid growth of AI is creating unprecedented demand for compute, networking and datacentre capacity, just as conventional hardware scaling begins to reach its physical and economic limits. This talk explores how Microsoft Research is reimagining AI infrastructure across the full technology stack to make future systems more efficient, scalable and sustainable.
Through examples from ongoing research, the talk will examine new optical technologies for high-bandwidth datacentre networking, optical coprocessors designed to accelerate AI inference with substantially greater energy efficiency and physical AI systems that could enable progressively autonomous, robot-first datacentres. Together, these projects illustrate why meeting the demands of future AI will require close collaboration across machine learning, systems, hardware, photonics and robotics.
Attend this talk to:
- Understand why the growth of AI workloads is challenging traditional approaches to compute, networking and infrastructure scaling.
- Learn how optical interconnects could provide both the bandwidth and reach needed to connect increasingly large AI clusters.
- Explore how specialised optical computing hardware could improve the performance and energy efficiency of AI inference.
- Discover how robotics and physical AI could support safer, denser and more autonomous datacentre operations.
- Gain insight into the multidisciplinary, full-stack research required to build scalable and sustainable AI infrastructure.
About the speaker
Dr Francesca Parmigiani, Microsoft Research Cambridge
Dr Francesca Parmigiani, FOSA, is a principal research manager at Microsoft Research Cambridge, where she leads research in optical computing within the Future AI Infrastructure team. Her work explores how photonic technologies can deliver faster, more energy-efficient AI systems and cloud infrastructure. Before joining Microsoft, Francesca was an academic at the University of Southampton’s Optoelectronics Research Centre, conducting pioneering research in nonlinear optics, optical signal processing and communications. She has published around 300 peer-reviewed papers, holds eight patents and is a Fellow of Optica. Francesca is also an active mentor and advocate for greater equality, diversity and inclusion across photonics and engineering.