Professor Tarek El-Ghazawi (ECE) and Professor Volker Sorger (ECE) are the principal investigator and co-principal investigator, respectively, on a four-year, $900K grant funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF). The project is titled “RAISE: The Reconfigurable Optical Computer (ROC)”. The ultimate goal of this bold interdisciplinary project is to engender a new class of reconfigurable computing devices. In specific, the objective is to create a nanophotonic analog reconfigurable computer (ROC) that is capable of computing out of first principles by solving those partial differential equations (PDEs) that are used for most simulations in science and engineering.