Thursday

Today there were not as many people around, but the quality of talks didn’t correlate with the number of people. Before I even had my morning coffee, I had already learned some things that surprised me.

Prof. Afshar showed that in sub-wavelength optical fibers, nonlinear effects are stronger than you think, and then he went on to demonstrate a neat effect of nearly binary polarization flipping in fibers, all by using a fully vectorial model for propagation.

Next I saw a nice presentation by Asma Al-Qasimi on cross-polarization, an extension of the work that  Prof. Wolf discussed yesterday (in his 53^rd year speaking at the OSA meeting!). She showed how cross-polarization can affect your measurements if you don’t account for it! Surely, this effect is fairly small in my laser-illuminated system, but nevertheless, it was enough to convince me to go back to the lab and add an extra polarizer to my setup to avoid this issue.

After the first coffee break, I saw two great invited talks, one showing beautiful results using phase imaging techniques to solve important problems in biology, by Prof. Gabriel Popescu. He was a postdoc at MIT when I first started, and I remember him patiently answering my stupid questions about interferometery when I was just an annoying first year (now I’m an annoying postoc with just as many, but different, questions). The other was by Prof. Soljacic, showing how to build photonic crystals with an angular (rather than frequency) bandwidth, and how to make one-way waveguides! I didn’t understand all the physics behind this, but watching a pulse travel along the edge of a photonic crystal, hit a wall, then proceed to snake around the wall and keep going in the same direction (instead of reflect/scatter off it), was pretty amazing!

Well, FiO is over for another year. It’s been fun. I hope to be back next year for my 4^th annual talk at this conference, baby steps towards my effort to catch up to Prof. Wolf’s impressive record!

Wednesday

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.

Tuesday

Today, I tried to learn all or nothing about quantum computing, and listened to a great talk about using nonlinearity in quantum computing, by Prof. White of Uni Queensland, Australia, where he went over the ideas central to this 'hot topic'. One thing I learned is that one photon can be used to flip the polarization of another photon. Cool!
 Prof. Psaltis of EPFL (who is my grand-advisor) showed some really cool things that can be done with soft lithography to make 'opto-fluidics'. My favourite was a variable iris that was controlled by the interplay of two fluids in a cavity, one clear and one opaque.
And to end the day, I stood at the back of a packed room for Prof. Wax's tutorial on digital holography, coherence imaging, and biological applications. This talk was presented in a very clear and accessible way - a great tutorial!
Here's a pic of some nerds who are super-excited to go to a Laserfest event (my former labmates):

Tomorrow, I will be attending the session on Unconventional Polarization as well as how to use it for good, and of course, the wavefront sensing section!

Monday

Wow, the plenary sessions this morning were impressive! Such mind-boggling things that can be done with light, and every talk was accessible to amateurs, so I actually learned something. The most important thing I learned was that, to quote Prof. Aspect, "the Fourier transform of a cigar is a pancake". And who knew you could do such crazy yet useful things with optical traps? Later in the day, I listened to some talks about retinal imaging, and went to part of the Nonlinear Imaging session, which was bursting out the door with people.

I am giving a talk tomorrow on phase imaging with very noisy data sets, using control theory estimators. This project was a great collaborative work for me - I was chatting with a postdoc who does quantum optics at MIT, who happens to be my academic uncle (advisee of my advisor's advisor), and he came up with the idea, then we enlisted help from my roomate and good friend, who happens to do control theory for a living, and in the process I think we all learned a lot about each other's respective fields. Plus, how cool is it to publish a paper with your roommate?

welcome to FiO!

First night at the conference, and it seems there's lots of people here already - it is great to see familiar faces. I just graduated a few months ago and moved from Boston to New Jersey, so this is also a chance for me to catch up with some of my former colleagues from MIT, as well as some from Singapore (I was part of the Singapore-MIT Alliance). Tonight I met up with them and we went to Jeramiah's (sp?) for some mildly fire-inducing ribs. I got all the juicy gossip from my old workplace, then we went over some practice talks for tomorrow.

I can highly recommend tomorrow's talk FME5 in the Spectroscopy, Imaging and Detection session, where the author's show how to recover diffused signals by introducing nonlinear media in the imaging system. Oh wait, I'm giving that talk!

Merry Conference Eve!

FiO starts tomorrow! And, like every year, it's Saturday night and I'm still fighting the good fight against Powerpoint...

Tomorrow hundreds of you will be flying into ROC, trying to explain to the person sitting next to you on the plane that, yes, you are on your way to an optics conference, but no, you cannot fix their contact lens prescription (although these authors can!). To avoid this, I am driving down from Toronto, where I am spending the weekend, hoping to arrive in time for the 'What's hot in optics' session.

There's a slew of 'extracurricular' activities all week, like receptions and student activities. Sadly, I am not a student anymore, even though I still feel like one (I still chase free pizza) - I wonder if they will be checking ID at the student member reception??

I am particularly excited about the showcase of educational demos, because I LOVE optics demos - just ask my friends/family. A few are on my website. My favourite* is the disappearing diamond video, although recently I have been taking a lot of footage of iPhone aliasing. I also made all the plots and diagrams of one of my group meeting presentations last year in stereo 3D with colored glasses, which led to my roommate buying me this hilarious tshirt:

Anyways, I wish everyone a safe trip, and see you tomorrow in Rochester!


* I am in Canada right now, so yes, FAVOURITE has a 'u'

if i had more time, i'd make this shorter

The FiO conference is less than a month away - time to start thinking about putting a talk together...By some miracle of science, I already have all of the results for the talk I will be giving in Rochester (in contrast to my usual state of staying up all night the week before the conference desperately trying to get good results). So now I can spend my time making the presentation better.

Most researchers would agree that it's harder to squash months of work into 12 min than it is to give an hour-long seminar on the same topic. Thus, preparing a FiO talk is an exercise in data compression - and it is always a lossy compression scheme. Some strategies I've seen implemented are:

1) downsampling - simply skipping most of the details and giving only a broad overview of the work, but sometimes key pieces end up missing.
2) no compression - 10 point font and 30 equations per slide, such that it would take hours to get through, but the speaker skips over most of it so quickly that no one is able to follow and they run out of time halfway through.
3) no compression - 10 point font and 30 equations per slide, such that it would take hours to get through, but the speaker is famous and no wants to tell them to stop talking. Perhaps the OSA should consider trying the solution developed by the Ig Nobel awards for keeping the conference running on time...

The trick is to find the right basis set of information that can convey the overall picture, without glossing over important details, restating ideas or being redundant redundant. Unfortunately, the optimal transmission of research to the receiver (audience) is both content-dependent and audience-dependent, and optimality criteria are often heuristic. Just looking at the overview of topics at FiO, one can assume the audience will be quite broad, so speakers, please keep it simple so that I can follow!