On the occasion of golden jubilee of Optical Society of India (OSI), a four-day international conference on Optics and Opto-electronics (ICOl-2014) has started at Instruments Research and Development Establishment (IRDE) in Dehradun on Wednesday. After inaugurating the international conference, Scientific Advisor to Union Defence Minister and Director General, DRDO, Avinash Chander, emphasized the importance of electro-optics and photonics in the development of battlefield management systems.
“OSI through this conference has provided good platform for the interaction and exchange of ideas among scientists, engineers and researchers engaged in the area of optics and opto-electronics,” he said, and highlighted the contribution of IRDE for successfully bringing niche community of photonic in the country.
He further said that this community is working very closely with Indian Institute of Technology, Indian Institute of Sciences, Universities and laboratories of other departments in realizing the state of the art products. He expressed that photonics is expected to bring the next revolution in the technology. Chander said that scientists and researchers will find a dramatic increase in computing power with corresponding reduction in size, weight and power in the next generation optical and photonic devices. Speaking on the occasion, SS Sundaram, Director General (ECS), DRDO informed that the focal theme of the conference is to emphasize on design, fabrication and testing of aspheric, freeform, diffractive and large size optics, micro optics and nano-optics devices. While expressing his views, Prof BP Pal, President, Optical Society of India, IIT Delhi, highlighted about OSI which is stepping up into 50th year in 2014. He told that Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) and Department of Science and Technology have collectively sponsored the conference besides, the conference is also co-sponsored by Optical Society of America (OSA), International Commission of Optics (ICO), International Society for Optics and Photonics (SPIC) and Optics and Photonics Society of Singapore (OPSS). Speaking on the occasion, Dr AK Gupta, Director, IRDE and vice chairman, Optical Society of India, said that the conference has received overwhelm response from around the globe and said that about 85 invited talks are scheduled in five sessions presented by researchers, developers, academician etc.
later, Chander also inaugurated the dust free building for optical fabrication and testing. A total of 600 international delegates from Japan, USA, UK, Singapore, France and scientists, researchers, academician, scholars etc. from the length and breadth of the country are participating in the event.