The MIT Enterprise Forum Central Coast will present, “Light Speed Santa Barbara: How Photonics Is Revolutionizing Big Data and the Central Coast” from 5 to 8 p.m. Wednesday at the Cabrillo Pavilion Arts Center, 1118 E. Cabrillo Blvd. in Santa Barbara.
Click here to register and take advantage of online discount. Registration is open through Tuesday night. The cost is $30 to register online, $40 at the door and $15 for students with ID.
Photonics is rapidly becoming an area to watch in both Santa Barbara and the world. Santa Barbara is positioned to potentially become a global technology leader in this exciting new industry, with local photonics firms raising more than $20 million in the past two years.
“The demand for photonics is large and on the way to becoming ‘enormous,’ yet the ubiquitous technology remains nearly invisible to the general public,” said Eugene Arthurs, CEO of photonics industry group to SPIE.
Calient Technologies, a firm working on photonic switches that could unclog bottlenecks in the cloud, will tell the story of how it went from boom to bust to boom after being launched during the first bandwidth build up of the dot-com era and then roaring back to life.
An expert panel will discuss the investment landscape in bandwidth-related photonics and how telecommunications firms are meeting ever increasing demand for bandwidth over a combination of copper and fiber-wired networks.
The panelists will include Gregory Koss, chief development officer at CALIENT Technologies; Bob Howard-Anderson, former CEO of Occam Networks; Wayne Rickard, senior director, WW sales and marketing for IntriPlex Technologies; and John Efutich, network application engineering manager of the Pacific region for TW telecom.
