CLEO Concludes: A Global Conference Extends its Reach by Going Virtual
Ryan Strowger, OSA Chief Events and Industry Officer
Last week, the 2020 CLEO Conference on Lasers and Electro-optics was held in a first-ever, all-virtual format. Co-sponsored by the American Physical Society, IEEE Photonics Society, and The Optical Society (OSA), and managed by OSA, the conference reached almost 20,000 registrants.
Demonstrating OSA’s commitment to the optics and photonics community, and the dissemination of scientific content, registration fees were waived for all online participants. Presenters were offered a significantly reduced publishing fee. Additionally, the OSA Foundation Incubic Milton Chang Travel Grants, which typically provide 10 student presenters with subsidized travel to CLEO, were modified to waive the publishing fees for 170 individuals.
Using web videoconference technologies, CLEO featured over 2,000 technical presentations, delivered in a combination of live and pre-recorded sessions, demonstrating a wide breadth of advancements and discoveries. The session recordings are now available on the conference website for individuals who registered for CLEO. In the coming months, all OSA Members will be able to view individual presentations approved for archiving on OSA Publishing’s Digital Library as supplements to conference papers.
Plenary presentations covered diverse topics from flexible display technology to silicon photonics, and featured speakers John Bowers, Director of the Institute for Energy Efficiency and Professor, University of California Santa Barbara, USA; Paul Kwiat, Professor, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Director of Illinois Quantum Information Science and Technology Center (IQUIST), USA; Bill Liu, Chairman and CEO, Royole Corporation, China and USA; and Kaoru Minoshima, Professor, The University of Electro-Communications, Japan.
Special events conducted virtually at CLEO included a series of Product Showcase demonstrations and presentations and panels including: Lidar Design Trade-Offs and Selection Criteria for Autonomous Applications; M&A and Financing Activity in Sensors and ADAS and Autonomous Mobility; The Brightest Light Initiative: The Future of Ultrafast Lasers in the United States; and Manipulating Quantum Systems: An Assessment of Atomic, Molecular and Optical Physics in the US by the US National Academy of Sciences. A panel presentation also featured key insights from the OIDA Quantum Photonics Roadmap. The roadmap report is available free to OIDA Members now and to OSA Members in June.
The CLEO Exhibit Hall was converted to an online marketplace featuring over 140 exhibitors and corporate sponsors. Please visit the Virtual Exhibit to see the latest technologies, products and services from industry leaders.
Many upcoming OSA Meetings and Congresses will be held in a similar web-based video format – please visit OSA Meetings for details on upcoming events in your field!
