Blog Roger

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!

This entry was posted on Monday, February 8th, 2010 at 10:49 pm and is filed under Work. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.