1

1. Elected Officers

Elections are still to be held in early September.

2. Current Chapter Members:

Michela Badioli

Christian Broadway

Barbara Buades

Josep Canals Casals

Parisa Farzam

Clara Gregori Pla

Ion Hancu

Claus Lindner

Rinu Maniyara

Paola Mantilla-Pérez

Jordi Morales-Dalmau

Shahrzad Parsa

Vikas Remesh

Luis Salazar Serrano

Enrique Sánchez Bautista

Anshuman Singh

Roland Terborg

Esteban Ureña

Claudia Valdes

Junxiong Wei

ALUMNI: Giovanni Volpe, Alberto Curto, Abdiel Pino, Giorgio Volpe, Kavita Devi,

2

3. Activities during August 2014 – August 2015

3.1 Seminars

The members of ICFO‐SPIE student chapters organize a series of seminars at our institute ICFO.

The speakers are mainly PhD Students and Post‐doctoral researchers, as well as undergraduate students, professors at ICFO, and visitor scientists. To encourage students to attend seminars, we offer some soft-drinks and snacks. The talks are attended by 15 to 25 students.

The coffee sessions are usually attended by a number that varies between 8 to 15 people.

List of the speaker and their topics are mentioned in the following table:

Date Speaker Topic

08.10.14 Naeimeh Behbood Generation of a Macroscopic Spin Singlet in Cold Atomic Ensemble

09.10.14 Dr. Peter Gruss (former President of the Max-Planck Society)

Coffee session

05.11.14 Claudia Valdes Speckle contrast spectroscopy and tomography: a new approach for deep blood flow measurement

14.11.14 Prof. Barbara Pierscionek (SPIE invited lecturer)

The optobiological synchrony of the eye lens

19.11.14 Osamu Takayama Steering of Dyakonov Waves

02.12.14

Venkata Ramaiah Badarla

Ultrafast optical parametric oscillators

16.12.14 Prof. Jeff Kimble Coffee Session

16.02.15 Dr Eugene Arthurs, CEO of SPIE

Coffee Session

19.02.15 Achim Woessner Plasmonics with high quality graphene

15.03.15 Seth Cousin Attosecond Lighthouse in the Water-Window

07.05.15 Dr. Andrew Brown Coffee Session

3

Senior Director for Global Business Development at SPIE

21.05.15 Prof. Rafael Yuste Coffee Session

22.05.15 James Douglas Cold Atoms Coupled to Photonic Crystals: Long Range Interactions and Photon Molecule

12.06.15 Matz Liebel Lessons from Vibrationally Coherent Spectroscopy

26.06.15 Carlo Manzo A Super-resolution View of Nucleosome Organization in Living Cells

09.07.15 Joel Cox Nonlinear Plasmonics in Nanostructured Graphene

4

3.2 ICONS Movie projection “Particle Fever” 24.03.15

In the proximity of the Large Hadron Collider second run, ICONS hosted the projection of the documentary “Particle Fever”. It is a nice documentary that shows, through the experiences of some scientists, the steps towards the discovery of the Higgs boson. 30 ICFOnians joined the movie projection.

3.3 Exploring different job possibilities for PhDs with external company Accenture

Dr. Jesús E. Gabaldón, Analytics Manager, Dr. Igor Blanco, Analytics Consultant and Elsa Sans, HHRR Manager at Accenture visited ICFO. As former academia researchers, they presented one alternative career path available for all scientists. Accenture is multinational company that requires top skilled scientist to guarantee solutions for the challenges of the digital era. The talk was attended by 40 people, and it was about "Fostering Analytics in Today’s Digital Market". The study of big datasets to obtain relevant information through mathematical methods has derived in the role of Data Scientists, which is the most required job nowadays.

The presentation was followed by an ICONS-coffee session with Dr Gabaldón, Dr. Igor Blanco (former ICFOnian who defended his thesis in January 2015) and Elsa Sans, HHRR Manager in the cafeteria.

3.4 Experiment: Measuring the speed of light (to be launched)

ICONS is working to launch an outreach activity consisting in the Measurement of the light speed using Foucault’s method. For that, we have put together an interferometric set up in an optical board. The current state of the project is optimization, due to

5

misalignments that at this point affect our measurement. Photos of the setup are the following.

6

3.5 ICONS Social Fridays

This is a regular activity that we organize during summer, to get together ICFOnians in a relaxed atmosphere, to discuss science, or any topic. We gather outside our institute and offer drinks and snacks. We have usually between 40 and 50 attendees.

3.6 ICONS at ICFO Open day + Girls, boys and photonics 12-13.02.15

Members of ICONS participated in the biggest open doors event of our Institute, the so called “ICFO Open Day”. It took place on February 13th. The day before ICONS collaborated with the outreach activity denominated “Girls, boys and Photonics”. ICONS members helped setting up a laser maze. In both activities we had more than 100 participants.

7

3.7 Tutorials for professional development:

10.02.15 Introduction to Python

This first tutorial of python was intended to people that was not familiar with the language. With examples and live exercises, the audience was able to use python to perform simple tasks that included plots of mathematical functions, linear algebra, symbolic calculations. We had 40 attendees.

8

12.03.15 Arduino Tutorial

We developed the activity "Arduino Tutorial", where we provided the students a kit with Arduino UNO, leds, resistors and other electrical parts to develop small examples.

The tutorial started with an introduction of Arduino UNO, all its components and technical characteristics and examples of nice projects developed with arduino. 18 participants joined us in the tutorial and enjoyed the possibilities of open source.

20.03.15 Managing scientific workflows in Python

In this tutorial, we talked about Spyder as a computing environment for people familiar with MATLAB, and the IPython notebook which is familiar to Mathematica users and those who attended the introductory Python tutorial. After we looked at pure functions and symbolic calculations with SymPy, features that are also at the

9

core of Mathematica. The rest of the tutorial focused on MATLAB-style linear algebra and numerical calculations using NumPy/SciPy. 12 attendees joined us. 04.06.15 Practical Tools to Pursue Open Science

The tutorial introduced the importance and the sense of open science now a days, describing it as the contemporary way to actually do science. The tool github was shown and a live example was performed where attendees had the chance to propose changes to a demo work that was uploaded.

The 15 attendees learned that using github for the collaborative work reduces the misunderstanding and misuses of dealing with common files, and avoids having infinite versions of the same document. One can also determine how much changes have been done to a document by a specific user. In that way, for the papers, there would be no room for discussion to determine who is the first author. But the main

objective of github is the construction of software in a collaborative way, and that was the take up message of the last part of the tutorial.

3.8 Monthly ICONS meeting

To organize the activities of the ICFO-SPIE student chapter, we meet up to discuss upcoming activities ranging from outreach to inter-chapter exchange meetings. Usually this is held during the first week of every month with a treat of pizza. It’s a common platform for the Ph.D. students to come up with new ideas for recruiting more people and to make aware of the ongoing activities. Any future outreach activities either to schools or for pre university students will be discussed and a separate protocol is recorded about the theme and outcome of the meeting. Usually the meetings are attended by a variable number between 12 to 20 people.

10

3.9 Solar Eclipse observation 20.03.15

ICONS with the help of staff from our institute, organized a setup with telescopes in the picnic area outside our building to observe the solar eclipse using its projection through the eyepiece on a screen. We also brought special filters so that people could look directly at the sun.

Even though it was a cloudy day, we had few chances to see the eclipse and get excited by this unique astronomical event.

11

3.10 Industrial visit to Fablab Barcelona 15.05.15

Friday 15th of May, a group of around 30 icfonians joined ICONS in a visit to Fablab Barcelona.

A FABLAB is a space for creation, equipped with machinery to work and model different materials and with the electronic supplies to automate any project. In this place we could see different machines for cutting, robotic arms, electronics bench, sewing machines and 3d printers.

12

After that, as a team building activity, we invited the group to go to the bar called Firefly in Barcelona, which counts with several board games, where we shared a night full of playing, tapas and beverages.

13

Industrial visit to BCN3D technologies 15.05.15

Thursday 18th of June, a group of around 20 icfonians joined ICONS in a visit to BCN3D technologies. The visit was divided in three activities: firstly, an introductory course on 3D printing where the technical basis for digital manufacturing technology was presented, secondly we conducted a tour of the assembly line of BCN3D technologies where we were able to see how the printers and other products are built (in some cases they print their own parts), and last but not least we had a “hands on” where we printed a neuron using a BCN3D+ printer.

From the visit we learnt:

What is 3D printing How 3D printing works What kind of 3D printers exist Sectors for which this technology is applicable Knowledge of the basic tools for printing Importing and exporting models to print Setup files for further manufacturing

14

3.11 IV Eps-young-minds-leadership-conference 29-30.05.15

On 29-30 May 2015, the Institute of Photonic Sciences (ICFO) in Barcelona hosted the 4th EPS Young Minds Leadership Meeting. 22 YM Sections took part to the event, representing 12 countries all around Europe. Many representatives from student chapters came to our institute to present their chapters and attend the prepared scientific talks and also career oriented talks. Around 30 people gathered together in this occasion.

15

4. Upcoming Events

1) Launch of activity “Measuring the speed of light with Foucault’s method”

2) Local Outreach Programs. Summer exhibitions.

3) Professional development programs for PhD students: ICONS poster competition, workshops by expert students on different scientific tools.

4) Industry visits

5. Financial details

Among these activities we organized, SPIE gave us a grant of 900 USD for developing the activity of measuring the speed of light. The funding was spent in the following manner:

Measuring the speed of light using Foucault's method

Item Cost Qntty Subtotal

Laser purple (405nm) 5mW 7 1 7

Laser red (650nm) 5mW 8 1 8

Laser green 5mW 14 1 14

MB3045/M - Aluminum Breadboard, 300 mm x 450 mm x 12.7 mm, M6 Taps

165.5 1 165.5

KM100 - Kinematic Mount for Ø1" Optics 34.83 2 69.66

P200/M - Ø1.5" Mounting Post, M6 Taps, L = 200 mm

48.6 1 48.6

PB1 - Mounting Post Base Ø2.48" x 0.40" High 21.33 1 21.33

C1502/M - Post V-Clamp Mount, Metric, One PM4/M Clamping Arm Included

86.94 1 86.94

TR100/M-P5 - Ø12.7 mm Optical Post, SS, M4 Setscrew, M6 Tap, L = 100 mm, 5 Pack

23.78 1 23.78

KM100B - 2" x 2" Kinematic Platform Mount 49.14 1 49.14

ME1-G01 - Ø1" Round Protected Aluminum Mirror, 3.2 mm Thick

12.06 3 36.18

TR3T - Ø1/2" Optical Construction Post, SS, 8-32 Taps

14.4 1 14.4

BS016 - 50:50 Non-Polarizing Beamsplitter Cube, 400 - 700 nm, 20 mm

159.3 1 159.3

16

Total 703.8 EUR

The remaining balance of our chapter is 2300 Eur.