NTT Research, MIT and several optical computing companies have demonstrated an approach to optically driven deep neural networks (DNN), called Netcast, which resolves the memory-access bottleneck in resource-constrained edge devices, enabling orders of magnitude energy and latency reduction. This approach was conceived by NTT Research’s Senior Scientist Ryan Hamerly and demonstrated in work performed by MIT Ph.D. candidate Alexander Sludds, under the joint supervision of Dr. Hamerly and MIT Professor Dirk Englund. Netcast resolves the bottleneck in computationally intensive tasks on computing devices by using optically accelerated edge computing.