Blog Roger

Back in July 2009, at the Functional Optical Imaging conference we organised at work, I met someone from Oxford University who was using a very interesting technique to do some high speed imaging. This led to a lot of excitement because it was obvious that we could make a camera to do the same thing much more easily and make the system a lot easier to use. Our two groups have since been working towards putting grant applications together – they are interested in imaging cardiac cells and whole hearts and we hope to design cameras that will make previously impossible things possible. It’s fair to say there’s still a lot of excitement both ends and there’s a good chance a lot of good science will come out of it.

To further flesh out ideas for grants, and for everybody in Oxford to see Nottingham, today was their first visit as a group to see us. This was great – very useful day, fixed some problems with the camera they already have, generated more enthusiasm, made plans for further grant applications and more. Now the slightly odd bit is that they had an article accepted in Nature Methods last week. This is a pretty good thing in its own right, but New Scientist got wind of it and decided to write a press release and other press organisations did the same. This was all under embargo until 6pm yesterday, when the article was published under the Advance Online Publication scheme. This made for an interesting day, because as we were sat talking, someone would periodically note the different publications that the press release had made it to and the ridiculousness of the headline (the award for most ridiculous goes to all those that herald the end of photography as we know it, e.g. the telegraph – I wonder who they think they’re quoting in the headline?)

I’m especially interested in this because we’re going to be developing the chip based version of this technology (which I realise I haven’t explained). We even get a small mention in a lot of the articles – nothing like a bit of reflected glory! :)

So, some links:

• The Nature Methods paper
• The New Scientist writeup

Photonics West is the largest photonics conference in the world. ~15k attendees, 3680 talks (before ones that were cancelled) and a couple of massive trade exhibitions. I went this year for the first time. In case you’re not sure, wikipedia reckons that photonics is “the science of photonics includes the generation, emission, transmission, modulation, signal processing, switching, amplification, detection and sensing of light”.

I went to present some of my work on making cameras and maybe learn some other things. The whole thing was a week – Saturday at 8am until Thursday 5pm, although thankfully I didn’t have to stay at the conference the whole time. More on that later.

My talk was on Thursday morning, so I’d already had chance to see lots of talks – some good, some less so. There were stacks of rooms (as you might expect for 3680 talks) all a variety of sizes. I found the room I’d be talking in on the first day and it was one of the big ones – I did a count of seats and there were around 200 or so. The small rooms could fit maybe 30 people, but if it looked like an interesting talk they’d be overflowing with people – I’m not sure whether that would’ve been worse.

I was the third talk of the session. The first talk went well, the second was a bit difficult to follow and then it was me. There were about 40 people in the session, which was a good number. I talked, I didn’t clam up and I looked at the audience. I probably could’ve done with a bit more gesturing with a laser pointer on occasion, but too much of that annoys me in a talk. Overall, it went well. Everybody seemed to be paying attention which is a good thing and I got about six sensible questions, which I could answer as well. One of the questions was “are these cameras available to buy?” – actually we’re after collaborators at the moment really rather than customers as such. I had four or five people come express interest after the session and have to get in touch with them.

All in all, it was a good success. I gave a good talk and went to a lot of talks as well. I learned quite a bit!