Plan Your FiO/LS Week
by Dom Siriani
Written by Dom Siriani
I recently noticed that the Frontiers in Optics/Laser Science conference program is now posted online. It’s nice to be able to peruse the conference talks before arriving at the conference. As is usual, you can browse all the sessions and presentations day-by-day and hour-by-hour to sift through and find what you might be interested in attending. However, the organizers have added a couple nice additional features that I don’t believe I’ve ever seen before.
For one, the program is searchable, so you can find all the talks on a particular topic or from a presenter of interest. Beyond that, though, there’s the ability to create a personal itinerary. To do this, you simply submit your email address to create a schedule that’s associated with it. Then you can browse or search the conference program and just click a checkbox to add a talk or an entire session to your itinerary. So you can pretty much plan out your week at the conference in advance.
You can also regain access your itinerary at any later time by pulling up the information associated with the email address you entered. So if you get halfway through planning your week and have to take a break (like I did), you always can pick up where you left off. And once you’re done, you can print what you planned out or add the schedule to your computer’s calendar.
I think this is a pretty cool new feature. If you’re like me, you’ll appreciate being able to have a plan set before even getting to the conference. Also, you can share your itinerary with friends and colleagues, which might help with making the often-tough decision of what talks to attend. All in all, I think this is a really nice use of technology to enhance and improve the conference-going experience. I hope others will find this to be true as well, and I’m confident that this is just the beginning of what can be done to improve what we get out of professional conferences.
If you’d like to check out the conference program and even plan your itinerary, go to: http://www.frontiersinoptics.com/home/conference-program/
Disclaimer: Opinions, interpretations, conclusions, and recommendations are those of the author and are not necessarily endorsed by the United States Government and MIT Lincoln Laboratory.
Posted: 27 Aug 2012 by Dom Siriani