SPIE PHOTONICS WEST REVIEW


to photonics businesses. ‘I see the cyber threat as a real challenge for high-tech companies,’ commented Fark. ‘People constantly try to hack and enter


our systems. It … doesn’t make you feel very confident to be aware that there are groups outside professionally trying to … get our ideas or machine results.’ Fark said that he’s seen incredibly


detailed imitations of Schott’s products. ‘I know that copying systems and technologies is obviously fraud, but doing it in this depth and with this professional aggressive attitude that is going on with cyber attacks we see today has reached a new level,’ he remarked. Schmidt said his firm is using higher


levels of protection for its more valuable information. ‘At Trumpf we identified what


we call the “crown jewels” and we found certain measures in order to protect these and have a separate system and firewalls in place to make sure the “core” of the company has a different security level – or at least the intent to have better protection – than the rest of the system.’ However, Scott Keeney, nLight president and CEO, said that although IT safeguards are important for protecting a company’s information, it can create a false sense of security. He referred to a business trip where he visited two companies separately in South Korea. Although they were very strict on controls – no laptops or phones were allowed in the meetings – the second company he visited somehow knew about what was discussed in the meeting with the previous company.


‘It had nothing to do with IT; it had


everything to do with people that were leaking information,’ he remarked. ‘While I think cyber security is very important, the problems I’ve seen had nothing to do with an IT issue.’ II-VI Photonics’ CEO Chuck Mattera said


that cyber security is an issue that needs to be addressed regularly and consistently by management teams. ‘We have a great sense of urgency and


responsibility for all of those in addition to the information and data about our employees and the like,’ he said. ‘We’re focused on getting our arms


around both the system that we use and a management review process so that we continue to understand the risk of threat,’ he said. EO


US BRAIN initiative funding set to continue under Trump


T


he US BRAIN initiative – Brain Research through Advancing Innovative


Neurotechnologies, which began under the Obama administration in 2013 – is likely to continue to receive funding under the new Trump administration, Edmund Talley from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) told a neurotechnologies plenary session on 29 January. Talley said the initiative had


‘strong bipartisan support’ in Washington, with the NIH alone granted an anticipated $3.2 billion up until 2026. ‘We really have some money to spend and we’re looking for people to spend it with,’ Talley told the audience at Photonics West.


The BRAIN initiative is made


up of federal and non-federal partners, of which the NIH is only one, and includes the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and the


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Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA). Talley described the NIH


neurotechnologies work as aiming for a ‘tool-driven revolution’ in order to further knowledge about the brain. Rafael Yuste at Columbia


University, and one of the chairs of the session, gave examples of some of these tools including connectomics – the study of connectomes, which are maps of neural connections – nanofabrication and optical imaging. He said that this is the kind of technology that should be ‘built together by the community, for the community’. Yuste spoke about using calcium imaging to see every spike from every neuron in the nervous system of Hydra vulgaris, a freshwater polyp and an extremely simple organism. He said these kinds of


techniques open up the potential to image networks of neurons rather than just individual neurons firing, something he likened to being able to view portions of pictures showing on a TV screen, rather


than just individual pixels. Imaging the entire nervous


system of H. vulgaris is like viewing the whole TV screen but, Yuste said, the picture is still unclear because of the current lack of knowledge about what the images show. One of the tools for


improving knowledge about neural circuits is a spatial light modulator (SLM), which shapes light via holographic projection. Scientists using microscopes with built-in SLMs can manipulate neural circuits and then watch the results. There are other techniques


like two-photon microscopy and now three-photon microscopy,


“This kind of technology should be built together by the community, for the community”


allowing researchers to view neurons deep inside tissue. Chris Xu, from Cornell University, spoke about three- photon microscopy during the session.


Maria Angela Franceschini,


at the Athinoula A Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, an institute in Boston, USA, detailed work on building the first commercially available


frequency-domain near-infrared tissue oximeter (FDNIRS) integrated with diffusion correlation spectroscopy (DCS). The FDNIRS-DCS instrument can monitor cerebral oxygen metabolism in infants using non-invasive optical techniques. Parisa Farzam, from the Martinos Center Optics Division, won the 2017 Translational Research Award at Photonics West for her work using the system to monitor intracranial pressure in patients with brain injuries, data that would otherwise be gathered by inserting a pressure sensor into the brain. Franceschini’s team is also


using the system as part of an ongoing study into malnutrition in children in Africa, with trials monitoring children in seven African villages. Yuste said the aim for the


neuroscience community is to map 50,000 neurons in the next five years, one million neurons in 10 years, and the entire human brain in 15 years. He also called for greater


ethical consideration and guidelines for neuroscience because of the advances being made in neurotechnologies and artificial intelligence which, he said, can be used to further science and human health, but also to manipulate people’s emotions and actions. EO


March 2017 Electro Optics 15


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