Ideas, start-ups and Milton Chang

Hey everyone..

It’s been busy past couple of days, resulted in fewer posts. I’ve been working on a project at RII, trying to make an idea work. Some of it was in my area of expertise. Some was new to me. And some of it was completely unknown (this is research after all). After some crazy tinkering, finally it seems to work!! :)

In the Silicon Valley everybody has good ideas. Everybody is ambitious. It’s very common for casual conversation to get around how we should take this or that idea and start a new business. Surely, people would pay good money for XYZ.. Start-ups here are many. And so are folks working in them. Life in a startup seems to be hard, but very rewarding if you thrive on learning and every day being new.

Milton Chang is a well-known name in the optics community. He was the President/CEO of Newport and New Focus, later an angel investor and is now at Incubic, his venture capital firm. Milton’s story of building Newport and New Focus, bringing them to IPO and making them “household” names is recounted to every rookie in our world.

Naturally, I was very excited to hear that Milton Chang is going to meet us for dinner and give a talk at our local N-Cal OSA meeting. What would he be like?

Milton Chang (coffee-ing) just before the talk

The first thing that struck me, he’s incredibly down-to-earth and nice. He went around the table, talked to absolutely everyone at dinner. He also hung out at the talk, giving advice and suggestions, sharing some of the lessons learnt from his experience in startup and venture capital.

Milton's simplest advice was – don’t rush. Do your best, put all of yourself in your idea.. but don’t rush into getting outside funding. He said that startups don’t have to be so risky. Yes, there is always a risk. But the risk can be mitigated if we put in enough effort up front. Make sure the idea is solid. Know what will be involved in developing the idea. Have a clear plan. And in order to develop a strong plan, spend time at the outset to clarify the unknowns in your idea.

Another important thing he cautioned was that the business plan should not be taken lightly. A strong technical idea could fail miserably if the market and business aspects are overlooked. An early team shouldn't have only technical strength but also a strong business component. Whether this comes in the form of a fulltime business person on the team, a part-time consultant, or you doing it all yourself, it needs to be done, and done well.

It was very good to get this balanced perspective about startups in optics and photonics, with his positive experiences as well as cautionary advice. Certainly got everybody’s entrepreneurial wheels churning

Note: If you got to this post looking for entrepreneurship guidance, a good reference would be Milton Chang’s book that has just come out – Toward establishing a successful technology business entrepreneurship. We just got a copy!

Cheerio and thanks for stopping by!

Update 09/22/2011: Just spotted the following notice on OSA's website.

"Milton Chang has partnered with the OSA Foundation to offer his new release, Toward Entrepreneurship: Establishing a Successful Technology Business to the OSA community with sales proceeds benefiting the OSA Foundation. 

All sales proceeds from the book will be donated to the OSA Foundation, and will be matched 100% by OSA through its contribution to the OSA Foundation General Fund.

Through this special offer you can purchase Toward Entrepreneurship for $20 (USD) minimum donation, or more if you like, for a limited time. The retail list price for the book is $35. There is no additional charge for shipping."

Looking forward..

Hey everyone..!

I'm back home again! Last week at COSI was such good fun! Next I look forward to Frontiers in Optics in October. This year FiO is in the Bay area. It's usually a big enough meeting that plenty of people travel to make it. So it's nice to have it in sunny California!

Although a large part of conferences involves checking out the latest and best in optics, much of it involves meeting new people and building strong professional relationships. Networking lunches, dinners and receptions are ideal for these. Most meetings also host exhibitions and poster sessions that let you connect with people who may have interests in your field.

In the past couple of years there have also been plenty of activities that are specifically targeted toward students and the somewhat younger crowd in optics. My favorite at FiO had been a couple of years ago in Rochester, they had Jorge Cham of PhD comics talk about procrastination! :) Some time back there was also the most awesome laser tag event and some cool eday demos. Young optics professionals from all over had come together to showcase all the cool and innovative stuff you can do with optics. Check out Nicole Moore's demo of a pinhole camera.

Ref: OSA E-day 2008, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K5kxn1aTV_4

This year's conference has quite a few fun events. I was just having a look at the Young Professionals and Student Activities link. The Entrepreneurs International Network (EIN) Workshop and VIP Industry Leaders Networking Event certainly look very useful! There's a Minorities and Women in OSA Tea that I'll attend.

Also, check out this Student Chapter Competition. It's going to be a contest - Mission Optical, where Student Chapters from all over the world will do optics demos for youth optics education using only ordinary household items.. under 25$.

I was thinking about the household items bit and you know, there actually are plenty of household items that can be used in optics experiments! A TV screen makes for an amazingly bright object with built-in illumination, plastic spoons show excellent stress birefringence, water and glass are always the good old reliable light-benders, jello can be cut out to be shaped like lenses, and as Nicole pointed out, even a Folger's coffee can is reusable as a lensless, pinhole camera! 

Promises to be highly imaginative, right? I'll be sure to check it out! Hope they take videos at this event.. or maybe I will!  

COSI 2011 - part 3 (final)

Hey everyone.. 

Today was the last day. A lot more relaxed. I got to hang out with some friends and do some fun stuff.  

Sunny and blue!

Wish I had taken more pictures of us! Next time..

There is so much in terms of talks I haven’t written about. I’m going to mention just a few things next.

This year’s meeting included quite a few talks on areas related to Lithography. I liked that because I don’t often go to conferences that are focused only on lithography. But it’s an interesting area and very relevant to anybody interested in imaging. So it was good to find some talks on this topic here.

Mehdi Vaez Iravani from KLA Tencor spoke about metrology in the semiconductor industry – mainly inspection of patterned and unpatterned wafers and related issues. There was also a very nice talk on model based metrology for resist patterns by Arie Boef from ASML. I also got to meet Dr. Alan Rosenbluth from IBM, T. J. Watson Research Center. His work on identifying a correction factor for source radiance in photolithography is an example of how much depends on “little” details in lithography. Clearly speed and accuracy are so very important in this industry.

Kenny Kubala from Five Focal gave an interesting talk on improving yield in wafer level cameras. He talked about measuring errors in manufacturing. They have their own fast, model-based algorithm for measuring post-assembly errors such as decenter and air-gaps. 

There was a very interesting talk on superresolution due to spatial non-linearity effects in non-linear material by Christopher Barsi from Princeton. He showed increased resolution and wider FOV.

There was also an interesting talk from Marc Christensen’s group on using structured illumination for optical superresolution using active illumination in cameras. Manju, the speaker at COSI, told us they are starting off a company called SLIC Technology which is trying to productize this work. And hey, startups for superresolution are always cool in my book! 

There is much I may have skipped here. These conference posts are written in some haste. Hopefully no one will mind typos and misspelled names. And then there was so much good stuff that I just couldn’t attend because of parallel sessions that I needed to be in. There was lots of Fourier Transform Spectroscopy, Wavefront Sensing, Adaptive Optics, 3D imaging, localization imaging.. it goes on. I attended some, but lots, I missed! I am hoping my colleagues caught it and will give me an update. 

The best part of conferences is always people! I am really glad I got to catch up with old friends again, meet new folks! The enthusiasm and excitement everyone has for their work is always infectious. And at conferences we get it all in one concentrated dose! :)

Now it’s time to go home. Am at the gate now and super-happy that Toronto airport has free WiFi!! :)

Cheers and thanks for reading!

COSI 2011 - part 2

Hey everyone..!

Yesterday and today were packed. We met lots of people, heard lots of talks, had lots of discussions. At smaller meetings like this there is plenty of opportunity to meet people and chat. The breaks tend to be well spaced, and then yesterday there was a networking lunch and an evening reception. So it’s been interesting, intriguing, sometimes highly entertaining, and finally exhausting! :) There is still another morning’s worth of events to go. But most of the conference is almost over. Has been such good fun!

My colleagues - Prasanna, Jorge, David and Kathrin had a talk on design for better depth estimation. It was very well received. I think this was a really good meeting to present work from our group.

Now let me give you all an update on some of the interesting talks we saw past few days. This post is going to get terrifically newsy now.

Ravi Athale and David Brady gave some interesting talks dedicated to the memory of Dennis Healy and his vision for sensors and imaging. Ravi proposed all sorts of ideas and visions for the future. History and vision go very well together.  Certainly got everyone thinking.

There were many talks on Holography. They started out with Oscan’s group discussing LUCAS, an incoherent holography technique to image cells. Some of his results use prototype attachments for compact cell phones.

George Barbastathis’s group showed much work on 3D optical imaging. He gave a very interesting talk on quantitative reconstruction of phase objects, visualizing 3D flow, bubbles, etc. using digital holography including ideas for compressive sensing.

My own (earlier) group from Rochester, Jim Fienup’s research lab, showed results by Abbie Tippie on lensless synthetic aperture digital holography for gigapixel imaging. This work involves generating a digital hologram of an object and building up the hologram by scanning the detector to effectively obtain a larger aperture and more resolution. Abbie talked about sampling conditions, propagation approximations, defocus, aberrations, drift and other mosaicking errors and how to handle them all.   

David Brady’s group also collaborated on this project. They too showed results, by Sehoon Lim, on the corrections they have implemented for their system. Both groups had slightly different implementation issues. I love that this collaboration got so much research work done on that front.

Optical superresolution, as some of you may know, is the area of my thesis research. So I love work on superresolution. Zeev Zalevsky was at COSI today and gave a great talk on recent advances in superresolution imaging. This was a very nice review style talk with tons of info. He had so many slides to show. Even a 40 minute slot is sometimes not enough. I’ll put in a link here if I find his material or paper somewhere online.

Alden Jurling from the Fienup group talked about some interesting approximations that they found worked for them and helped to speed up broadband phase retrieval. He actually blurred some of his data to get rid of high frequencies (treating them like noise), which allowed him to quickly zero-in on a reasonable estimate. Speeding up algorithms is often critical for practical implementation. So it’s good to see them explore the regime of speed versus accuracy to try and find a balance.

Sam Thurman showed a useful method to estimate the OTF of an imaging system – phase and magnitude, using a binary Siemens Star Target. The cool thing is that his technique works even for undersampled images. This is probably because the Siemen’s Start Target has repetitive identical lines which, in my understanding, gives him multiple “measurements” and allows him to get around the sampling limits.  

Fredo Durand gave a very nice talk on computational photography, briefly describing the work on light fields, coded imaging, feature matching, SIFT, blind deconvolution and superresolution as done in the computational photography community.  

His talk was followed by another great talk by Edward Adelson where he demo-ed as well as talked about an elastomer they have developed, called GelSight, that easily deforms when touched by a feather, brush, thumb, even bubbles. This deformation can be seen on the other side of this skin-like Gel and imaged in 3D using photometric stereo. The images were impressive.

Ref: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKoKVA4Vcu0&feature=player_embedded#at=107 and http://www.mit.edu/~kimo/gelsight/

Ramesh Raskar’s group had an interesting talk on their picosecond camera – a streak camera that can capture picosecond phenomena, as long as they are repetitive events, using pulsed light and strategically sampled frames. They demonstrated images of light traversing a bottle, bouncing off of objects, etc.

Ed Dowski gave an interesting perspective on how optics may one day be manufactured like chips. Scalable, cost effective and easy to design.

Oh, and there was much work on CASSI and other such spectroscopy techniques, a lot of good talks from the Brady and Gehm groups.

It’s getting late now. But there is still more I want to note here. I’ll write again soon. 

Till then, cheerio and thanks for reading!