Before the conference started, I meant to post one more discussion about phase-space optics describing and simulating the notion of instantaneous frequency. But I will have to wait till my laptop agrees to the plan. I use LaTeX2WP (WP=WordPress) python script by Luca Trevisan for posting mathematical content, and somehow python refuses to get going on my laptop. Apart from that minuscule disappointment, my time so far in the US has been fantastic!
I have been in the US since October 6 and done good deal of traveling. It is slightly unusual to travel before the conference but I need to return home just after the conference. I am recounting some of the exciting sights and university visits that I did. Hope someone traveling after the conference finds travel information useful.
Let’s go in reverse chronological order. I have just returned half an hour earlier from a trip to lake Tahoe (right now it is 1.12 am of Oct 11). My friend working in the bay area drove me to this beautiful lake. You may already know that it is on the border of California and Nevada and is one of the most beautiful sights in the US. I learned that the emerald bay of the lake Tahoe is the second most photographed sight. It is a great place to enjoy water-scooter (which is called jetski here), motor boat, and para-sailing among other things. We reached there late in afternoon and wind had picked up (it is end of the summer season). So we were advised against para-sailing and jetski, but had great fun driving a motor-boat for an hour. If you plan to visit Tahoe, check with the people at rental business about the weather and what is possible. It is around 3.5 hours drive from San Jose/San Francisco and if you reach there before lunch, there are better chances of your being able to get more hands-on water experience than driving around a motor-boat.
Before Tahoe, I had the staple diet of tourists in San Francisco : Alcatraz prison, Golden gate bridge, Fisherman’s wharf, Segway tour, Exploratorium and Tactile dome. The first three sites I mentioned need no further mention.
I experienced the `personal transporter’ segway for the first time and I must say it is fantastic. The machine is designed to maintain balance – therefore if you lean forward, it goes forward to regain balance. This balance feedback loop is implemented very well and the machine seems to perceive driver’s intentions.
Tactile dome and the exploratorium were great fun too. Tactile dome is one of the exhibits of the exploratorium. It is a pitch-dark dome which you navigate using only your sense of touch. You pay 17 bucks to enter it (this fee includes entrance to the exploratorium). You have an hour to enter and exit this labyrinth as many times as you like. I found that if you are not scared of dark and just following your senses, you can enter and exit in 15 minutes flat. However, it is amazing that every time you go through it, you discover different structures inside it. I made two trips through the dome and on my second trip, I discovered a place inside to seat and relax!
I had good brainstorming sessions at Stanford and UCSF. I visited Marc Levoy and Zhengyun Zhang at Stanford to take a peek at their light-field microscope. I found that they have another interesting project going on. It is dubbed Camera 2.0 and it is about designing an open-source camera with programmable hardware and software. Marc is presenting a talk about light-field microscope on Wednesday morning at FiO. We had a great discussion on phase-space representation of imaging systems (topic of my talk on Monday) and registration of gradient information measured through various methods (topic of my talk on Wednesday). Lab visits are great because they can add a lot of new perspective to your repertoire.
At UCSF, I was visiting Nico Stuurman and Arthur Edelstein at Ron Vale’s lab. My key reason for visiting them is their open-source acquisition software micro-manager. I have found this software useful for being able to construct useful automation for custom imaging systems and have contributed to a hardware driver for Olympus scopes. They are an enthusiastic bunch of people willing to make a positive impact in the microscopy world, where proprietary and closed acquisition software have failed to meet the needs of microscopy tinkerers. I shall be working with them to add support for the quantitative phase imaging method (AIDPC) – which we have developed.
An important note if you are visiting Stanford and want to catch some beautiful sights of the campus: make sure you DO NOT carry any heavy luggage (even 75% of the size of the typical cabin bag). Stanford has an arbitrary rule which prohibits even medium sized bags at places worth visiting (e.g. Hoover tower, Cantor arts center). That is not bad – what is bad is that they do not have any place for you to store it and even worse, they do not believe in verifying that you are not carrying anything dangerous.
That’s all for now. Tomorrow (sorry, today) morning is going to be an exciting day as the FiO kicks off . I plan to meet Milton Chang (a successful serial entrepreneur & venture capitalist and the keynote speaker at the OSA student chapter leadership meeting) to capture some of his views about entrepreneurship – especially in the area of open-source projects. Then there will be the ‘Hot in Optics’ summary from 4-6 pm at Fairmont. It’s going to be a busy day, so Good night.
