An Exchange of Diverse Topics and New Ideas
UCLA OSA Student Chapter
Big Data Photonics Workshop 2016: “Trends Shaping the Future of Photonics” was organized at Carnesale Commons in University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) on 25 March 2016 by Jalali-Lab at UCLA jointly with Technical University of Denmark (DTU). The workshop drew 85 participants from USA, Denmark, and around the globe. The workshop was sponsored by Innovation Center Denmark – Silicon Valley with support from The Optical Society (OSA) and SPIE. Prof. Bahram Jalali, the Northrop Grumman Opto-Electronic Chair in Electrical Engineering at UCLA, co-led the event with DTU Professor of Photonics Engineering Professor Idelfonso Tafur Monroy and Mr. Mikkel Bülow Skovborg from Innovation Center Denmark, Silicon Valley.
Cejo Konuparamban Lonappan, a doctoral student in the Jalali Lab, who is also the President of the Optical Society (OSA) and SPIE Student Chapter at UCLA led the student organizing committee for the workshop. “The workshop served as a very unique platform for bringing together big data analytics and photonics researchers from very diverse disciplines and also from various parts of the world to present their high-impact research, exchange new ideas and potentially start new collaborations,” said Lonappan.
Many attendees commented that the workshop was very well organized and enjoyed the diversity in the topics that were presented unlike the usual 'too focused area' workshops and expressed interested in attending such future workshops. The student researchers took part in the poster presentation contest and also the opportunity to network with experts from academia and industry.
The workshop had 17 presentations by experts in four sessions on very diverse topics: Optical Systems in Telecommunications; Big Data, Smart Cities and the Internet of Things (IoT); Big Data in Business, and Finance; and Photonics in Biological Systems.
Speakers from the industry included Dr. Xiang Zhou, tech lead in Google’s platform advanced technology group, who presented the challenges posed by big data applications on data center optical interconnects and Dr. Jesper Bevensee Jensen, chief technical officer of Bifrost Communications ApS in Denmark, who demonstrated Bifrost’s next-generation passive optical network architecture (NGPON) for accommodating big data applications.
Speakers from academia included faculty members from Stanford University, DTU, Aarhus University – Denmark, Aalborg University Copenhagen, Del Rosario University in Bogotá, Colombia, and UC Davis. Academic representatives from UCLA included speakers from Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science, Anderson School of Management and Department of Physics and Astronomy.
The workshop concluded with the announcement of the student poster contest winners by the panel of judges, followed by a wine reception sponsored by the OSA Centennial Special Events Grant and a special OSA Centennial Celebration presentation. The presentations from the workshop can be found on the website.
