MATTHEW PEACH ECOC 2018
call achievements of pre- competitive projects, especially from the European H2020 Program. “Attendees will also find, gathered in a single place and for the whole duration of the conference, the Points of Contact (PoC) people and information from the major European networking bodies, which I am confident will give a great opportunity for networking.” Bogoni is also hopeful that the Rome event will be friendlier and more accessible for both industry-focused and academic types: “A stronger link has been set this year between conference and exhibition: poster and demo Moreover, an entire hall will be shared including the food and beverage area, and a relaxation zone for fostering the interactions between research, innovators and market players alike.” So with her personal experience of working in both industrial and academic environments, what does she think about the state of the industry in 2018; is it in good shape or is it suffering from an over-supply of competitive companies? “I believe that the market is improving competitively compared to say 10 years ago. Even going to the industry events now compared with a few years ago, exhibitions are bigger and there is greater interest. But from a research point of view I think that optical communications is a bit saturated at the moment; so on the other hand, ten years ago, although the shows were smaller there were more significant innovations making a bigger difference. “Today, I think that the evolution and the future of photonics is much bigger than just in optical communications – it’s actually much larger than that. I believe there needs to be imaginative development in areas such as microwave photonics and in other areas of photonics, such as quantum, sensing, research, and in space, for examples.” She concluded, “To chair a conference like ECOC is a huge and exhausting work, but extremely enriching from many points of view.” sessions will be open for all exhibitors and visitors.
for monitoring system ageing, performance monitoring and fault identification in real 5G transport and access networks, based on smart methodologies such as neural networks and machine learning.” ECOC 2018’s programme also shows a continuing effort to fully exploit coherent systems. More and more advanced signal processing is nowadays embedded in the receiver, so technical talks will cover various machine- learning approaches. Inevitably transmission rates are on the up again so on the agenda are details of high-capacity systems designed to meet the also-growing demands for cost effectiveness. Bogoni said, “We will also be showcasing optical communication methods based on probabilistic shaping – a technique already in the spotlight for some years now, but which remains of interest for its great flexibility in terms of information and reach trade-off.” examples of other hot topics that will be discussed in Rome: “A great interest is emerging on photonics for microwave systems, which includes topics as photonics developments supporting 5G, terahertz applications, communications and sensing dual-use applications. There will also be a new subcommittee focused on microwave photonics subsystems, which has already received a good number of submissions for 2018,” she said. She explained how ECOC’s technical conference programme is designed to achieve a balance between commercial and academic presentations: “The role of industry and end-users in the photonics applications is emphasised on Sunday. The whole day is dedicated to 15 workshops organised and sponsored by several representatives of both companies and end-user leaders and associated academic/research bodies on these specific sectors.” For the first time in 2018 there will be a ‘demo session’ included, allowing presentations from open BUSINESS AND NETWORKING Bogoni then gave some
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| ISSUE 14 | Q3 2018
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