It's March already...time for some catching up. February 13-18th was Photonics West week in San Francisco - like every year. What was different this year however, was that Jule and family had returned back to Germany: no luxury accommodations including good food and entertainment for me this time! When I texted Jule a picture of my current location waiting for my cable car (can you tell where that is exactly?)
Photonics West was as good and massive as ever: more than 22000 attendees, 1345 exhibiting companies and close to 5000 presentations, which required for the first time to not only occupy Moscone North and South, but also Moscone West. Needless to say, I met a lot of people, most interesting to me was, that I met all of my former interns there with the exception of my most recent one.
The next trip was a quick one: I hopped on a plane on Thursday, March 10th, crossed the continent to Washington DC, but this time to Reagan airport rather than Dulles (like last year), which meant I made it in time for the CLEO TPC (technical program committee) meeting evening reception. Which turned out to be more interesting than expected: I ended up chatting with Keshav, who is controlling rats (i.e. controlling if they make a left or right turn) by hitting a specific region of the rat's brain with proper light pulses...still gives me the creeps!
The next morning it was time to get to work on hammering out the conference sessions, though I was a bit early:
As we had by far the smallest section (industrial applications) of the program, we were done fairly quickly (despite some hiccups due to some confusion about where some talks would ultimately end up). So in the late afternoon, I hopped back on a plane to Portland...
