Month: November 2014

One thing we are interested in promoting, as a student chapter, is collaboration with researchers outside the School of Physical Sciences. The University of Kent conducts research in a broad range of imaging techniques not only at our Applied Optics Group, but also at the School of Engineering and Digital Arts and at the School of Computing. To foster interdisciplinary collaboration, a colloquium between these schools was organised to share the current topics being researched and build relations across the constituent groups.

Seven invited talks were scheduled in addition to a keynote presentation by Prof. Adrian Podoleanu, head of the Applied Optics Group. The talks covered a wide range of topics including optical coherence tomography, single pixel cameras, plenoptic imaging, high speed cameras, and image processing on field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) and graphical processing units (GPUs).

The event had over 30 in attendance, with a lively Q&A session. This event would not have been possible without the collaborative effort involving the University of Kent student chapters for both the Optical Society of America (OSA) and Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).

This colloquium was successful in sharing the wide breadth of imaging research going on at Kent and we look forward to many new research endeavours as we work together.

On Tuesday 11th November, members of the OSA Student Chapter at Kent gave lab tours to interested undergraduate Physics students from the University of Kent. Students were shown around the Photonics labs and spoke with researchers (both post-doctorate and PhD) about their work within the Applied Optics Group.

The undergraduates were able to gain perspective into the research environment, particularly in optics but also academia as a whole. The visit was also greatly beneficial to the AOG members as it gave an opportunity to relate their work to a less experienced audience.

The chapter would like to give thanks to all AOG members involved, and of course to the undergraduates who expressed enthusiasm for the event. A final acknowledgement goes to Prof. Podoleanu for publicising these tours in his “Electromagnetism & Optics” lectures.

More photos are available here

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