Photonic data analysis in 2050

Photonic data analysis is a field at the intersection of imaging, spectroscopy, machine learning, and computer science. The diversity of both data types and application scenarios requires flexibility in the methods applied, combining a full range of computational methods, from classical chemometric techniques to state-of-the-art deep learning solutions. Interdisciplinary and international collaborations are needed to accelerate the progress of photonic data science. An underlying data infrastructure and standardization will be needed to provide collaborative platforms for research on data comparability, enabling the integration of novel photonic techniques into routine applications. The increasing complexity of the questions being investigated requires the application of more sophisticated data-driven models, which may only be optimized for large data sets. Unfortunately, novel techniques in the early stages of development can rarely provide a variability of measured samples sufficient to build a generalizable complex model. To overcome this problem, state-of-the-art methods will emerge for working with extremely limited or unbalanced data, as well as for dealing with device-to-device variation. Further developments are also foreseen in computable artificial intelligence methods, which will allow the validation of models of any architecture by comparing them with the knowledge of the researchers.