Economic pressures put spotlight on innovation at Photonics West
CONFERENCE PREVIEW
From the scientific sessions and short courses to the exhibit hall and plenary talks, Photonics West 2002, to be held Jan. 19 to 25 in San Jose, CA, will showcase the innovations in technology that are expected to help the optoelectronics industry—and those it supplies—overcome the current economic crisis.
As usual, SPIE's premier laser and optoelectronics meeting will feature a record number of research papers and short courses, plus a three-day commercial exhibit that has sold out for the third year in a row. While the focus of the four symposia that make up Photonics West—LASE, Optoelectronics, BiOS, and Electronic Imaging—is once again cutting-edge technologies and applications, the 2002 meeting is expected to have a more practical flavor than in years past. Panel sessions and other special events will cover topcs such as future trends in optical networking, the status of optical components in the telecom industry, intellectual property issues, and venture capital and optics.
In addition, reflecting the increasing push to make commercial production of optoelectronic and fiberoptic components more efficient and cost-effective, the Photonics West meeting will feature a forum on photonics manufacturing and automation. The daylong event will cover emerging technology, economic, and standards issues in the manufacture and packaging of components and subassemblies. Keynote speakers include Jean-Marc Verdiell, director of optical platform technology for Intel (Santa Clara, CA), who will discuss automated manufacturing for 10-Gbit/s transponders, and William Russell, branch chief at Wright Patterson Air Force Base (Dayton, OH), who will discuss photonics manufacturing and automation technologies within the US Department of Defense.
The plenary sessions are a mixture of the practical and the nearly possible, reflecting the notion that technology innovation will play a key role in helping the economy turn around over the next 12 to 18 months. John Marburger III, director of the US Office of Science and Technology Policy and the president's key science adviser, will speak on federal funding of key university R&D areas, including optics, lasers, and advanced networking. Emory Kristof, an undersea photographer with the National Geographic Society, will discuss high-definition-television stereoscopic imagery and is expected to show 3-D HDTV stereoscopic video of the Titanic.
Photonics West continues to attract the top scientists and researchers in the laser and optoelectronics world, and the 2002 meeting is expected to yield a number of cutting-edge papers and presentations. The Optoelectronics conference, for example, has a new component—"Nanotechnologies in Photonics"—which is the first time all papers in this emerging field have been gathered into a standalone program.
"The time has come for us to pay close attention to what happens at the atomic or molecular level when we design optoelectronic or electronic devices," said conference co-chair Elias Towe of the University of Virginia (Charlottesville, VA). "Nanotechnology has the potential to enable an entirely new class of devices and processes and to improve the performance of existing devices or extend their capabilities."
Similarly, according to symposium co-chair Gregory Quarles of VLOC (New Port Richey, FL), two of the strongest conferences within LASE 2002 are those involving biomedical applications for free-electron and ultrafast lasers. Both sessions were added to the LASE program just two years ago but consistently see standing-room-only audiences, Quarles noted.
"The ultrafast lasers are really gathering steam," he said. "We see this as the next big boom area in laser technology."
Next-generation capabilities are also at the heart of one of the hottest topic areas in the Biomedical Optics (BiOS) program—radiative decay engineering. The interaction of fluorescent molecules with metal surfaces may revolutionize the field of fluorescence, according to BiOS conference co-chair Joseph Lakowicz, director of the Center for Fluorescence Spectroscopy at the University of Maryland School of Medicine (Baltimore, MD).
"This new field promises to make nonfluorescent molecules like DNA fluorescent and to yield a millionfold more photons from a single fluorophore," he said.
The Electronic Imaging program, co-sponsored by SPIE and the Society for Imaging Science and Technology, also features several strong emerging technology components, including 3-D image capture and applications, virtual reality, visualization and data analysis, Internet imaging, optical security, and visual communications.
"This is a premier international event," said EI 2002 co-chair John Merritt of the Merritt Group (Tysons Corner, VA). "The presenters and organizing committee represent the critical mass of this field."
Kathy Kincade