Zeev Zalevsky
Faculty of Engineering and the Nanotechnology Center, Bar-Ilan University, Israel
Zeev Zalevsky received his B.Sc. and direct Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from Tel-Aviv University in 1993 and 1996 respectively. Zeev is currently a full Professor at Bar-Ilan University and its Vice President for academia industry relations. He is the former Dean of the faculty of engineering at Bar-Ilan University, Israel. His major fields of research are optical super resolution, biomedical optics, nano-photonics and fiber-based processing and sensing architectures. Zeev has published more than 620 peer review papers, 360 proceeding papers, 9 books (6 authored and 3 as an editor), 36 book chapters and about 100 patents. Zeev gave about 700 conference presentations with more than 260 invited/keynote or plenary talks.
Zeev is a fellow of many large scientific societies such as SPIE, OSA, IEEE, EOS, IOP, IET, IS&T, ASLMS, AIMBE and more. He is also a fellow of the American National Academy of Inventors (NAI). For his work he received many national and international prizes such as the Krill prize, ICO prize and Abbe medal, SAOT prize, Juludan prize, Taubenblatt prize, young investigator prize in nanotechnology, the International Wearable Technologies (WT) Innovation World Cup 2012 Prize, Image Engineering Innovation Award, NANOSMAT prize, SPIE startup challenge prize, SPIE prism award, IAAM Scientist Medal Award, International Photonic Award, Dr. Horace Furumoto Innovations Professional award, The Asian Advanced Materials Award, Edison Award, IEEE distinguished lecturer award, VEBLEO Scientist Award, Joseph Fraunhofer Award/Robert M. Burley Prize, Lotfi Zadeh Memorial Award, E&T Innovation Award, CES (Consumer Electronics Show) 2022 Innovation Award, German Innovation Award 2022, the Humboldt research prize, SPIE 2023 Chandra S. Vikram Award for Metrology, IVS research excellence prize, German Berthold Leibinger innovation prize, IEEE Photonics Society (IPS) 2023 Laser Instrumentation Award, 2024 SPIE Dennis Gabor Award in Diffractive Optics, the Vidyasagar Award and more.
Besides his academic research activity, Zeev is also very active in commercializing his inventions into start-up companies. Zeev was and is involved in technologically leading of more than 10 startup companies.
Towards remote photonic brain computer interface
I will present a photonic sensor that can be used for remote sensing of nano-vibrations such as those associated with hemodynamic processes in our brain. This technology is based upon illuminating a surface with a laser and then using a camera with its special optics to perform temporal and spatial tracking of secondary speckle patterns in order to have nano metric accurate estimation of the movement of the back reflecting surface. The capability of sensing those movements in nano-metric precision allows connecting the movement with remote bio-sensing and with medical diagnosis capabilities.
The proposed technology was already applied for remote and continuous estimation of vital bio-signs (such as heart beats, respiration, blood pulse pressure and intra ocular pressure), for molecular sensing of chemicals in the blood stream (such as for estimation of alcohol, glucose and lactate concentrations in blood stream, blood coagulation and oximetry) as well as for sensing of hemodynamic characteristics such as blood flow to various regions of the brain. It was used in medical trials for remote medical diagnosis of various diseases such as cardio-pulmonary diseases.
The capability of sensing the hemodynamic activity when applied on the brain and when combined with advanced machine learning and AI based algorithmic allows us to detect various insights that are important for brain computer interfacing (BCI) application. For example, I will show how we detect which one out of the five senses cortices of the human brain is stimulated in a given moment, how we remotely classify the objects that a subject is looking at and thus stimulate his visual cortex (visual cortex shape recognition) only by sensing the activity at the visual cortex, how we perform remote decoding of inner speech by directing the sensor to brain’s Broca area and finally how directing the sensor to Motor cortex allows connecting our remote sensor with electrical motor and operating it with various types of movements only by thinking about them.
We believe that such an ability could initiate a breaking through era of BCI in which communication with external machinery and sensors could be done by the power of thinking and in a non-invasive manner.
