Hans Melchior
With all the reorganizations, mergers, acquisitions and privatisation’s and the emergence of new companies, all positioning themselves to serve and exploit the vigorously growing national and worldwide telecommunication markets and to bring new vistas, you might wonder what our Lasers and Electro-Optics Society is doing in this respect.
First of all, we, as scientists and engineers that belong to IEEE-LEOS and other professional societies, can be proud of these developments. Many of us can take credit for having creatively contributed to the scientific, technological and engineering base of these successes, be they in fiber-optic communications, opto or micro electronics, or communications science. As professional societies, we are involved in facilitating the rapid exchange of information in these fast moving fields through high quality publications and conferences or meetings that bring participants together to present and discuss progress and newest results. Our IEEE-LEO-Society, with its interests in lasers, optoelectronics, fiber-optic communications and related fields, and with its members coming from the major industrialized countries and beyond, throughout the world, is very active in this information exchange, both with publications and meetings of its own and with jointly sponsored publications and meetings. LEOS publishes the Journal of Quantum Electronics, Photonics Technology Letters and the Journal of Selected Topics in Quantum-Electronics and sponsors the LEOS Annual Meeting as well as several topical meetings. In addition, IEEE-LEOS along with several other IEEE Societies and the Optical Society of America (OSA) publish the Journal of Lightwave Technology. LEOS, OSA, and the American Physical Society jointly sponsor CLEO, the highly successful yearly Conference on Lasers and Electro Optics, that has spawned the sister-meetings, CLEO/Europe & EQEC and CLEO/Pacific Rim. IEEE-LEOS, IEEE-Communications Society, and the OSA also jointly sponsor the rapidly expanding, very successful, and highly exciting Optical Fiber Communications Conference, OFC.
It is with these highly successful, jointly sponsored meetings in mind, that we closely follow the current talks and negotiations about a closer co-operation between the OSA and SPIE - the International Society of Optical Engineering. We can assure our LEOS members, a fraction of which are also members of OSA, that we together with the leadership of the OSA will maintain and possibly even enhance our close co-operation in the sponsorship and organisation of such successful meetings as CLEO and OFC.
The LEO Society itself is already part of a much larger organization, the IEEE, that, with its over 300 thousand members throughout the world and its more than thirty societies, covers all aspects of electrical and electronics engineering. In connection with the subject of today’s column, the ongoing revolution in communications technology, LEOS with its interests in lasers, optical communication and optoelectronics benefits particularly from close co-operation with the IEEE societies on Electron Devices and Communications. The IEEE is an organization that helps us bring significant benefits to our LEOS members. To cover the subject of sensors, a council was recently formed amongst the interested IEEE societies for a co-ordinated promotion of sensors in publications and conferences. To ease access to publications and meetings, IEEE has negotiated agreements with other societies such as the German Electrotechnic Association (VDE).
Also, in adapting to the coming transition to electronic publishing, LEOS, already a leader in this area, has just recently made available to all its members, free electronic access to all its journals, JQE, PTL, JSTQE and JLT.