I attended CLEO 2016 on Thursday, 9 June, the last day of the exhibits. Unlike OFC 2016, CLEO is a more scientific conference, so you don’t find on the exhibit floor the big booths of the Telecom giants. Instead the emphasis is on displays of electro-optic components and small subsytems. As expected, a sizeable number of off-shore manufacturers are represented.
The technical talks are very well organized in three different types of sessions: Applications and Technology, Fundamental Science and Science and Innovations, thus enabling attendees to choose the talks that match best their interest.
I attended a few sessions and I was pleased with the quality of the papers and their presentations. Of particular interest to me were:
New work in the burgeoning field of light beam Orbital Angular Momentum for optical communications.
Continued developments and applications of Non-Linear Optics.
A special session on the recent earthshaking (no pun intended) detection of gravitational waves of 14 September 2015 with the twin Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) detectors.
I was told by the organizers that the number of attendees broke a record high of 4,600, with 320 exhibitors and more than 2,100 presentations! As always, the conference was well organized and the treatment of the Press superb!