SPIE Symposia Highlights

Some 350 recordings of conference presentations are included in the online proceedings from the 2016 SPIE Remote Sensing and SPIE Security + Defence symposia in Edinburgh, and SPIE.TV captured an additional five presentations at an industry session during the week.

Nearly 1000 participants and 41 exhibiting companies attended the September 2016 event to hear about the latest research developments and see state-of-the-art products for environmental remote sensing, high-power laser systems, cybersecurity, image and signal processing, and related technologies.

Recordings of selected conference presentations are a new offering from the SPIE Digital Library. These cover topics from the 23 conferences at the annual event, including organic electronics, fiber lasers, quantum technologies, lidar, hyperspectral imaging, optical countermeasures for defense, and remote sensing technologies for measuring everything from urban air quality sea-level rise to soil moisture.

The sensors, systems and next-generation satellites conference was one such conference with several audio and video recordings from its sessions. The conference also had the distinction of having its proceedings published as the 10,000th Proceedings of SPIE volume.

SPIE 2016 President Robert Lieberman called the occasion “a truly prestigious moment in SPIE’s history” during his welcoming remarks.

The multimedia presentations recorded at a daylong industry session (available at SPIE.TV) include a keynote talk by Sir Brian Burridge, senior vice president at Leonardo-Finmeccanica (Italy) and chair of the UK Defence Solutions Centre, who provided a perspective on the photonic industry’s ability to be agile and commercially successful with technologies for intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR).

Industry speakers whose recorded presentations are also available include Stephen G. Anderson, director of industry development at SPIE, who provided the most recent update on the core photonics components market; Ian Reid, CEO of CENSIS (UK); Stephen Marshall, director of the Hyperspectral Imaging Centre at the University of Strathclyde (UK); and Jaime Reed, head of R&D in the Earth Observation, Navigation, and Science Directorate of Airbus Defence and Space (UK).

Other highlights from SPIE Remote Sensing and SPIE Security + Defence included a captivating plenary session and the dedication of the conference on remote sensing for agriculture, ecosystems, and hydrology to the late Manfred Owe, a long-time chair of the conference and senior scientist at NASA Goddard Spaceflight Center.

Plenary speakers were:

• SPIE member Sir David Payne, professor of photonics and director of the Optoelectronics Research Centre and the Zepler Institute at University of Southampton (UK), who spoke on high-power fiber lasers for beam combination
• Sir Peter Knight, Senior Fellow in Residence at the Kavli Royal Society International Centre at Chicheley Hall and professor of quantum optics at Imperial College London, who spoke on quantum technology for a networked world
• Wim Bastiaanssen, chair for global water accounting at the UNESCO Institute for Water Education, Senior Fellow at the Daugherty Water for Food Institute at University of Nebraska, Lincoln (USA), and professor at Delft University of Technology (Netherlands). Bastiaanssen talked about Earth observation technologies for improving water and food security.

Knight told the audience that quantum technologies are key resources for providing innovative capabilities in optical and gravitational imaging, navigation, precision timing, computing, and encryption, and he predicted that quantum clock applications would be deployed within five years.

Knight also predicted applications in communications, such as hand-held quantum key distribution (QKD) systems and quantum sensors for metrology, navigation, and gravity sensing would be a reality within the next decade. Quantum computing and “quantum materials,” he said, are still 15 years or so away.

The chair for SPIE Remote Sensing 2016 was Klaus Schäfer of the Institute of Meteorology and Climate Research at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (Germany). Cochairs were Christopher Neale of the Daugherty Water for Food Institute at University of Nebraska, Lincoln (USA), and Iain Woodhouse from University of Edinburgh’s Geography and the Lived Environment Research Institute.

SPIE Fellow David Titterton of UK Defence Academy served as chair of SPIE Security + Defence. Cochairs were SPIE member Stuart S. Duncan of Leonardo-Finmeccanica, formerly Selex (UK); SPIE member Karin Stein of Fraunhofer Institute of Optronics (Germany); and SPIE Senior Member Ric Schleijpen from TNO Defence, Security and Safety (Netherlands).

Read more event news from SPIE Remote Sensing and SPIE Security + Defence 2016.

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