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 The 18th International Conference on Plastic Optical Fibers (POF 2009) held in Sydney, Australia, Sept 7-11, 2009, continued the tradition of new POF technical developments and high-quality presentations. The organizers — Maryanne Large, Leon Poladian, and Alex Argyros of the University of Sydney — did a superb job of organizing a first-class program despite the state of the world economy. In addition, they added a number of new innovations that hopefully will become fixtures in future POF conferences.
These included:
- POF Workshops held Monday and Tuesday on "POF Modelling" and "Microstructured POF," attended by 30 participants.
- Student paper contest and award in honor of Prof. Pak Chu, who has made numerous contributions to the growth of POF technology.
- A POF Art contest
- A post-deadline session, which proved to be one of the highlights of the conference.
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Attendance at the conference topped 120 from 19 countries:
- - Australia: 34
- - Japan: 13
- - Spain: 9
- - Germany: 8
- - Korea: 6
- - U.S.: 6
- - Others: 4
The attendees were from industry, universities, and research organizations:
- - Universities: 71
- - Companies: 39
- - Other: 10
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Abang Annuar Ehsan from theInstitute of Microengineering and Nanoelectronics, Malaysia (left) with speaker, Dr. Paul Polishuk of IGI Group and POFTO.
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Social events included a boat trip around beautiful Darling Harbour and conference dinner at the WatersEdge, just under the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Highlights of the technical program follow.
Examples of invited papers:
- POF Markets and Applications: A Worldwide View" — Industry POF market could be 2-10 times larger, if industry promotes in 40 different markets
- The Giga Home project — Japanese government plans to invest $95 million into new "Fiber to the Display" Project
- Prof. Koike reports on a new co-extrusion process for GI-POF
- POF Sensors
- Distributed POF Sensors for Structural Health Monitoring and Field Test Results
- Non-Linear-Optical and Photo-mechanical Phenomena in dye doped Polymer fibers as the Basis for making Ultrasmart Materials
- Terahertz Waveguides
- POF-PLus Project: towards Gbps Transmission over SI-POF for Home Networking
- Biomedical Applications of POF
- Earthquake Sensing: Polymer Optical Fiber Sensors for Large Deformation Strain Measurements
- POF Hardware Analysis
- Polymer Optical Fibers for Architectural Illumination
Post-deadline papers:
- Error Free transmission over 37 meters of Microstructured POF at 5Gbps using Visible Light
- Design of Highly Thermal Resistant Step index POF for Automobile LANs
- Perfluorinated Low Bending Loss Gi-POF for Home Use
- Silk Fibroin Photonics: An Ancient Fiber see new light
The next ICPOF conference will be held October 19-21, 2010, at the Keio University Campus in Yokohama, Japan (See www.pof-con.org/ICPOF2010.html) Copies of this year's proceeding are available from Information Gatekeepers Inc.
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