Sunday Program

Share your excitement!  Promoting your personal brand effectively

Time: 9:00am- 10:30 am

Session Chairs:
Hannah Pierson, LightPath Technologies, USA
Linda Harris, MKS Instruments, USA
Kimberly Clifton, Rochester Precision Optics, USA

How to promote your personal brand so that the right people notice you. This workshop will help to develop and improve your interpersonal skills, professional presentation, and digital marketing with LinkedIn. 

Lab Automation and Experimental Techniques Hackathon

Time: 11:00 am-12:00 pm

Session Chairs:
Nicolas Fontaine, Nokia Bell Labs, USA
Mohamad Idjadi, Nokia Bell Labs, USA

Come and learn the most powerful techniques expert researchers and professionals use to enhance their productivity and make their life easier. Our everyday research is most fun and productive when we concentrate on creative problem solving. Good news: for almost all other tasks, there are tools available for you to make your engineering life easier. Many software packages written by the large community allow you to automate menial tasks, build graphical user interfaces, visualize data and much more! quickly and easily This event aims to bring awareness of these packages by hosting multiple interactive demos of mostly free and open-source software built in easy-to-learn languages such as Python. The demos are set up around informal discussion tables with plenty of time for inspiring discussion and questions, alternated with lighting talks and videos showing the usage of these tools.

Mohamad Idjadi (Nokia Bell Labs)

“Red Pitaya – an inexpensive all-in-one lab instrument”

Laboratory instruments can be expensive. Often, researchers need to perform tasks that are not demanding such as monitoring low-speed signals with an oscilloscope, synthesizing RF signals, or controlling systems with a PID controller. Acquiring dedicated and application-specific instruments, like high-speed multi-channel oscilloscopes or low-noise PID controllers can be cost-prohibitive and impractical in some cases. Advanced FPGA solutions offer a more affordable and versatile alternative as they can be programmed to perform various hardware functions. This demonstration aims to introduce Red Pitaya as a powerful, cost-effective, and efficient tool for researchers and students.

Mohammad Jobayer Hossain (AIM Photonics)

Python for Integrated Photonics Design, Layout, Test Automation and Compact Modeling

Weipeng Zhang (Princeton University)

“Development of control and packaging for photonic computing research “

Research in photonic computing has a lot of practical issues in control and packaging aspects. Compact and robust experimental setups are prerequisite for realizing innovative ideas into convincing demonstrations. This talk will give a brief review about our experience, showing how we transform from an old bench-sized setup based on unreliable probes and bulky instruments into a new palm-sized setup with fully packaged control and IO. This talk will also discusses about the existing and incoming technologies for developing a further advanced setup for photonics research.

Caleb Dobias (CREOL, The College of Optics and Photonics)

“Photonic Laterns and their Characterization”

This demonstration is an introduction to Photonic Lanterns, an all-fiber device that offers a low loss transition to and from multimode and single mode fibers.  These devices show utility in range of applications including lidar, wavefront sensing, and multiplexing.

Practical Edge and Long-Term Perspectives of Quantum Technologies

Time: 1:00 pm-3:30 pm
Session Chair: Michael Brodsky, Army Research Laboratory, USA

Rapidly growing quantum information processing field relies on photonic technologies and calls for quantum-aware photonics engineers. This session welcomes curious beginners and seasoned experts by offering some forward-looking views on which way quantum science and technology might be heading in near term and distant future.

Tutorial Speakers:
Quantum Networking and the Future Quantum Internet
William Munro, Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology, Japan

Cryptography and Quantum Technology: A Practical Overview
Pavel Lougovski, Amazon Web Services, USA

Enhancing LiDAR performance using classical & quantum time-frequency correlations
Amr Helmy, University of Toronto, Canada 

Shedding Light on Government Partnerships

Time: 4:00 pm-5:30 pm
Session Chair: James Cahill, Army Research Laboratory, USA

US Government leverages significant photonics research portfolio — both via internal research efforts and external funding to academia and industry. How can you engage with this potential government partner? What is it like to work with or for the government research and development community? Through talks and a panel discussion we will explore different vignettes of collaboration opportunities: from grants to cooperative research efforts; from fundamental scientific research to transitions of ideas into real-life products.

Panelists:
James Joseph, Army Research Office, USA
Sang Yeon Cho, Army Research Laboratory, USA
Michael Fanto, Air Force Research Laboratory, USA
Dominique Dagenais, National Science Foundation, USA