carlosleephotonics

both

EPIC, the European Photonics Industry Consortium, was created in 2003 when after the telecoms crash, the founder Tom Pearsall, noticed a whole community of companies going bankrupt and people losing their jobs, and there was no umbrella organization representing specifically this community "photonics". Ironically Tom Pearsall is an American and he created the European association.

21 October is a good date for Day of Photonics, because 21 October 1983 is when the general assembly of general weight and measure approved the speed of light.

Excellent question! Nowadays there are different technologies that might be able to give solutions towards affordable autonomous vehicles. Some of them are among the ones you mentioned. Have you seen this video from EPIC?
https://www.epic-assoc.com/epic-online-technology-meeting-on-new-developments-in-fmcw-lidar/

Have you seen this video? "Beating Moore's Law: This photonic computer is 10X faster than NVIDIA GPUs using 90% less energy". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1R7ElXEyag