By Patricia Daukantas

Can’t be at OSA’s Annual Meeting this year? Try the next best thing: Keep in touch with Frontiers in Optics (FiO) through Web 2.0 social networking applications.

Three of OSA’s young professionals who will attend FiO (next week in San Jose, Calif., U.S.A.) have started keeping blogs and have agreed to post at least once daily during the conference. The bloggers and their affiliations are:

• Adam Zysk, Illinois Institute of Technology
• Bob Schoonover, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
• Shalin Mehta, National University of Singapore

They have already started to post their introductions and their thoughts prior to the meeting. For example, Shalin is interested in the special symposium on phase space optics, which will happen on the afternoon of Wednesday, Oct. 14. He also recommends that international visitors start the U.S. visa application process sooner rather than later.

Bob is giving two talks at this year’s FiO, and he’s already written about his experience with his debut presentation at the 2005 Annual Meeting – when one of OSA’s Honorary Members, the legendary Emil Wolf, entered the room just as he began speaking. Adam, whose specialty is medical imaging, recently blogged about the importance of backing up your data, and he provided a non-laboratory anecdote to emphasize the point.

Thanks to one of my fantastic OSA colleagues, chapter relations manager KiKi L’Italien, you can catch up with all three blogs at once on the FiO Web site. You can also keep up with the latest Twitter stream from the FiO conference on that FiO page.

Of course, OPN will be blogging and “tweeting” from FiO too, just as we did from last spring’s CLEO/IQEC. Follow us @OPNmagazine on Twitter. "See" you at FiO!

2009-10 October