At the Chairman's breakfast this morning, I heard a passionate speech by a man who educates children in optics topics and conveyed the importance of showing children how to 'play' with science topics, giving them freedom to develop their curiosity. Surely, this is also the strategy for engaging grad students in creative research?
Next, I went to the unconventional polarization session, where Prof. Colin Sheppard described some work he did years ago, which is recently a popular topic, showing that varying the polarization of a focused beam in specific ways can change the focusing properties. I must admit, this phenomena surprised me, but certainly it can be useful - some of the other authors in the session showed how to create designer beams with specific polarization properties.
The post-deadline session was quite a mixed bag of talks, and I particularly liked Prof. Trebino's clever trick for getting a FROG to characterize a nanosecond pulse in a single-shot image. With a name like FROG, and the crazy ads for Swamp Optics you've all seen around, I can really appreciate this group's sense of humour.
Tomorrow afternoon I will be at the 'encoding optical information' session, with a talk on 'Fundamental limits to optical components' by Prof. Miller that looks intriguing. There is also a sparse sampling throughout the day of talks on Compressive sensing, which seems to be popular. One author even suggest that compressed sensing negates the Nyquist limit! Of course, this isn't true - it only allows you to take less samples because you know a priori the amount of information in the signal, and if the signal isn't sparse, then the problem isn't convex.
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