[time-nuts] IFCS-EFTF 2019 Joint Technical Program Committee meeting

Magnus Danielson magnus at rubidium.se
Fri Jan 11 03:32:05 UTC 2019


Fellow time-nuts,

I thought I share some experiences from working inside a conference, 
because it may be of some interest to you.

Two of the conferences for time and frequency, atomic clocks etc. is the 
International Frequency Control Seminar (IFCS) and the European Time and 
Frequency Forum (EFTF). These are sibling conferences in US and Europe 
respectively. Every other year they have a common conference and then 
this is alternating sides of the pond. I've been going to both of these, 
but mostly EFTF. IFCS is a conference under IEEE UFFC, which is the IEEE 
society under which time and frequency work is held.

This year I got nominated/pulled into the Joint Technical Program 
Committee (JTPC) for Group 2 of Microwave measurement. That is where you 
find many of the normal "electric" oscillators (as compared to optical 
clocks), measurements and related. This was on request of the Group 2 
vice-chair (that is vice-chair of JTPC, responsible for Group 2) Craig 
Nelson of NIST.

This is the first time I do this kind of work, so it is interesting to 
go through the process. It is also interesting in that I file abstracts 
myself, so do many others. The process is such that as a reviewer, you 
get assigned a bunch of papers. The process is such that you should 
never review yourself, which is good. I got to review 36 papers, and 
eager to do a god job I was done the first week of the 30 day window. As 
you review abstracts, you have to read them and there is several things 
to think about. I sure learned some and will take experience with me for 
next year. In the end, the scores from all reviewers is weight together 
and from that you get a pretty good overview about the papers. Some of 
these papers we are forced to reject for various reasons.

Also, we then have to figure out if they should go for lecture 
presentation or poster presentation. The concept of poster presentation 
may not be all that familiar, because what most people think of as a 
presentation is that you stand up and talk before a sitting audience 
which is the lecture presentation, where as for poster presentation you 
have your material up as a poster and then during the poster 
presentation sessions, lasting several hours, people walk around and 
then you discuss and explain your work and answer their questions.

The student papers all go into poster presentation. Some student papers 
looks really good and is promoted to also do lecture presentation. We 
also the nominate what looks like the most promising student papers for 
a special process where a selected set of judges goes around and listen 
to the student poster presentation, and then elects a winner. The winner 
from each group is traditionally announced and receive the hours and 
applauds at the social dinner for the conference. This is part of how 
this community celebrate good student efforts, and often it is clear 
that they distinguish themselves. It is always a joy to celebrate their 
efforts!

Then comes the task of combining together all the lecture and poster 
presentations into session blocks, assign names to these sessions and 
nominate moderators for the sessions. It can be a bit hair-pulling at 
first, but eventually the pieces fit together and we figured out the way 
that our group would assign these sessions. We where quite satisfied at 
the end.

When all 6 groups have done that, we then combine our sessions to try to 
make the big puzzle going, putting these sessions in the programme of 
the conference. This is complex since for instance, you do not want to 
have the same group of people want to choose too much about which tracks 
they would have to go to. As a normal visitor, you sometimes wonder why 
they scheduled things the way they did, and it turns out... well, it's 
kind of hard and complex. There was a lot of conflicts to consider. In 
the end we felt relatively satisfied, but some conflicts will always be 
there and we just try to avoid the worst of them.

The currently on-going partial shutdown of the US government where not 
helping, so we where missing a lot of people. I ended up being the only 
one physically present in my group, but through phone conference we 
where able to get work done. It could have gone smoother, but everyone 
understood the issue and with help we achieved it. That part turned out 
to work quite well for what ended up to be a 2-person group that I was 
in, we where very efficient during the circumstances and had good 
discussions resulting in a result we both where happy with.

There will lots of final touches before the decisions goes out end of 
next week, but the rough plan is there.

So far, this have been a very interesting experience, it is a nice way 
to give back to the community to serve on such committee work, and I 
have already said that I will be willing to do more of it. In fact, I 
will be doing some more already at the conference.

I know of at least three time-nuts contributing abstracts to the 
conference, including myself. I will not disclose what I know happen to 
those contributions. That will have to go out through the official 
channels, which is coming out soon enough anyway. I have to wait too, to 
see how my contributions went through.

The three big things at these conferences is the many optical clocks, 
the optical comb range of uses and then frequency and time transfer, 
especially optical. The optical side is really undergoing a huge 
revolution, and we already start to see spin-offs into other areas. 
Classical atomic clocks has also started to become interesting, 
including various forms of sensors, such as magnetometers etc. Much of 
the things we hobbyist look at is off to a few of the smaller fields in 
a conference. However, it ends up being that the many pieces is needed 
to form the full field, and each contribute to extend it's part of the 
field.

This years conference will be in Florida, so for me this trip is the 
first time I'm in Florida for real. Changing planes in Miami does not 
really count. Earlier this week I was supposed to do a two-day event at 
NIST in Boulder and, well, that didn't really work under the 
circumstances, but I met some friends, including fellow time-nut Tom 
Knox, and we had a good time, so it was not completely wasted. I was 
offered a chance to present at NIST, but it became clear last week that 
there would be no chance for that this time. I will continue to work on 
that presentation, it will be fun. As I spent a week around New Years 
Eve at Bob Camps house, I did the major work on that one, with good 
input from Bob.

Tomorrow I will present on the Stable32 future, which is will be a topic 
for another email to report on events. Again a range of time-nuts is 
involved and supporting this effort. The boundaries between the 
hobbyists and professionals can be encouragingly thin at times.

Lastly, let me say that it is humbling to work with these people and get 
recognized for once contributions. Being able to take on some of these 
chores for the benefit of the community and also enjoy it clearly is 
worth it for me at least.

Cheers,
Magnus





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