Attend Asia-Pacific Optical Communications (APOC), one of the world’s major conferences in optical communications.

APOC ended on 30 October 2008.

APOC — Asia Pacific Optical Communications conference 2008 has concluded. The 5-day event, which included a full day of workshops and courses on Sunday, an all-day Industry Forum, and 4 conferences in 8 parallel sessions, plus a small exhibition was a great success.

The conference opened on Monday with the morning Plenary session, chaired by Symposium Chairs Lars Thylen of the Royal Institute of Technology Sweden, and Prof Wei Yang of our local host, Zhejiang University.

The Wednesday evening APOC Banquet was the highlight. The Banquet included both traditional and modern entertainment arranged by our local hosts. The banquet also included presentations from the symposium chairs and the four sponsored Best Student Paper Awards.

The event was very positive, with Prof. Tingye Li summarizing, “this was by far the best APOC ever”.

Starting next year SPIE will team up with the OSA and IEEE/LEOS to co-manage APOC merged with a much younger conference, AOE. The new joint venture will allow APOC/AOE to anchor with the growing AOE Exposition and thus potentially draw a much bigger audience to this telecom-centric event.

View official APOC Chinese website

The symposium encompassed:
Over 625 invited and contributed papers, Plenary Session, Industry Forum, workshops, courses, Welcome Reception, and Banquet + Tour.
Presentation topics include:

Passive Components and Fiber-Based Devices
Optoelectronic Materials and Devices
Optical Transmission, Switching, and Subsystems
Network Architectures, Management, and Applications

SPIE APOC Plenary Session
Monday 27 October, 8:30 to 11:45 am

Opening Ceremony
8:30 to 9:15 am

Challenges of Optical Broadband Network
9:15 to 9:45 am

Wu Hequan
Vice-Director of Advisory Committee for State Informatization of China (China)
Hequan Wu is also Vice-Director of an Executive Council of China Institute of Communications (CIC) and Chinese Institute of Electronics (CIE), respectively. He also takes on Director of Experts Committee of China’s Next Generation Internet (CNGI) project. He was a senior member of IEEE.

Nanophotonic Devices
9:45 to 10:15 am

Dieter Bimberg
Technical Univ. of Berlin (Germany)
Dieter Bimberg research interests include the growth and physics of nanostructures and nanophotonic devices, ultrahigh speed photonic devices for the future Terabus, single photon emitters for quantum cryptography and ultimate nanomemories based on quantum dots.

Photonic Challenges Toward Future Broad Band Society
10:45 to 11:15 am

Yoshio Itaya
NTT Communications (Japan)
Yoshio Itaya is Executive Director of the NTT Science and Core Technology Laboratory Group, and is responsible for directing NTT’s leading edge technology and advanced research.

Technologies for a Renaissance in Long-Distance Optical Communications
11:15 to 11:45 am

Robert W. Tkach
Bell Labs., Alcatel-Lucent, Crawford Hill (USA)
Robert W. Tkach is Director of the Transmission Systems Research department at Bell Laboratories. His research has involved dispersion management, optical amplification, optical networking, and high-speed DWDM transmission systems.