In this talk, I'll first present a broad overview of several established fields in physical and quantum optics that are ripe for data science and machine learning applications. Secondly, I'll present some metadata related to different fields of optics in a mini science-technology-and-society study. I'll end by speaking about my current research, which presents novel approaches of optical computing for "smaller-brain" neural networks. This last segment relates to ME202, where we implement spectral computational methods for feature extraction in modern data analytics and machine learning problems.