Joint replacement surgery has significantly improved the lives of patients suffering from hip and knee-related issues, offering relief from pain and enhanced functionality. Despite its success, there are ongoing efforts to refine and enhance surgical techniques. This presentation explores the current state and future prospects of joint replacement surgery, focusing on the integration of sensors, robotics, and artificial intelligence (AI). External and implantable sensors provide real-time feedback, aiding surgeons in achieving greater precision and ensuring optimal healing post-surgery. Robotic-assisted surgery offers unprecedented levels of accuracy and consistency, surpassing traditional manual methods. Looking forward, AI holds immense promise in revolutionizing joint replacement surgery by analyzing patient data, aiding in preoperative planning, predicting outcomes, and providing real-time intraoperative assistance. The synergy between sensors, robotics, and AI forms a dynamic feedback loop, empowering surgeons to deliver superior outcomes and improve patient care. As these technologies continue to evolve, the future of joint replacement surgery appears increasingly promising, with the potential to further enhance patient quality of life.

Recent advances in attaining ultra low loss highly confining silicon nitride photonic integrated circuits (PICs) with loss in the dB-per-meter range, and their heterogeneous integration with MEMS and ferro-electrical PICs have opened up novel applications that benefit not only from scalable manufacturing, compact form factor and low power, but crucially have now reached a point where the performance is on par and even exceeding that of legacy optical systems. I will describe a range of novel advances, including photonic integrated circuit based frequency agile lasers with fiber laser phase noise, parametric traveling wave amplifiers, Erbium amplifiers on chip, as well as soliton frequency combs, with applications from coherent communications, LiDAR to cryogenic quantum interconnects. In addition, I will described novel ferro-electrical PICs based on Lithium Tantalate that offer ultra-fast optical modulation.