MEFISTA ESRs will be participating in a transferrable skills workshop on CAREERS on 13 and 14 June 2023 at the Adrian Cadbury at Conference Aston with by ESRs on EC-funded ETNs Post-Digital (GA 860360) and Mentor(GA 956713).

13 June

9.30-11.15 UK Paul Knobbs, grant writing

11.30-12.30 UK Andrew Ellis, career paths

12.30-13:30 UK, Lunch at Conference Aston

13.30-17:00 UK Sandy Sparks, careers and CVs (coffee break mid afternoon)

14 June

9.30-16:30 Sandy Sparks, careers and CVs (with a mid morning 11.15 break and a mid afternoon 3pm coffee break)

19.00 Tri-project ESR meal, details being sent directly

Speakers include:

Andrew D. Ellis Andrew is professor of optical communications at Aston University where he is also the Deputy Director of the Institute of Photonics Technologies, and he holds adjunct professorships from University College Cork (Physics) and Dublin City University.

Professor Ellis has academic and industrial experience in optical communications, so come prepared with your questions. Experience includes 13 years for BT, 10 years at Aston 9 years at University College Cord in Ireland, 4 years at the COOP and Spar and 3 years at Corning Ltd and 0.5 years at The Griffins Head.

Paul Knobbs is a highly experienced Research Funding Manager at Aston University with a demonstrated history of success with a range of funding schemes, UK, EU and International. He has considerable experience of programme and project portfolio management and is highly skilled in proposal development.

Sandy Sparks Professional Development Consultant:

Sandy has over 30 years of experience in professional and personal development, especially leadership & researcher development, working in both the private and public sectors, in the UK and internationally.

Her areas of expertise include:
▪ Career Development
▪ Skills Development e.g. academic writing, presentation skills, networking skills
▪ Research Leadership Development / Researcher Development
▪ Research Culture
▪ Inter-cultural and cross-cultural work esp. Unconscious Bias
▪ Equality, Diversity & Inclusion
▪ Impact & Evaluation
▪ Enterprise, Entrepreneurship, Innovation & Creativity
▪ Coaching and Mentoring

MEFISTA Workshop – Optical frequency combs and LIDARs for self-driving cars

24 January 2023, online.

This 1-day Workshop focused on Optical frequency combs and LIDARs for self-driving cars, from real field testing to potential commercial plans: an industrial perspective.

James Heaton ML Engineer of Aurrigo UK spoke alongside Johann Riemensberger from Luxtelligence in Switzerland.

MEFISTA Transferable Skills Workshop II (TSW II)

5th-6th December 2022, online.

This 2-day Workshop focused on entrepreneurship skills and project management.

TSWII addressed ESRs from the MEFISTA project and other sisters projects POST-DIGITAL and MENTOR.

For more information about the workshop please follow the link.

Warrick Harniess from Scandinavia Stories spokes on Entrepreneurship and IP, and Doug Foulan spoke on Project Management.

MEFISTA was joined by Post-Digital ETN 860 360 and MENTOR EID 965713.

TSW2 Doug Foulan

MEFISTA TSW2 Warrick Harniess Entrepreneurship workshop

MEFISTA Mini Symposium, In-Person, Aston UK

11-12 APRIL 2022

Machine-learning in photonics & Comb based LIDARs applications: from aerospace to robotics

Prof. Arnaud Mussot, University of Lille: “All-fiber frequency agile triple-frequency comb light source”

Prof. Derryck Reid, Heriot-Watt University: “Frequency Comb Development for the Extremely Large Telescope”

Prof. Dmitry Skryabin, University of Bath: “From combs to topology in space and time”

Dr. Sivaraman Subramanian, University of Exeter: “Optical whispering gallery modes as a platform for single molecule biosensing”

Dr. Jonathan Silver, NPL: “Kerr nonlinear optics with whispering-gallery-mode microresonators”

Dr. Shuangyou Zhang, Max Planck Institute: “Dispersive Kerr Soliton in a Microresonator via Bichromatic Pumping”

Prof. Alessia Pasquazi, University of Sussex: “Sability properties of soliton and turing pattern states in microresonator filtered lasers”

Prof. Zhixin Liu, UCL: “Cavity-less frequency comb for optical-assisted signal processing”

Prof. Victor Torres Company, Chalmers University: “Low-noise, power-efficient soliton microcombs”

Dr. Wen Zhou, University of Oxford: “Neuro-inspired photonic computing using microcombs”

Dr. Lucia Caspani, University of Strathclyde: “Integrated frequency combs for quantum applications”

 

MEFISTA summer school

MEFISTA summer school on Frequency combs in mode-locked lasers and fibre resonators

27-28 October 2022, in person at UPC (Universitat Politecnica Catalunya) Barcelona, Spain

More details here.

MEFISTA Summer School UPC October 2022

Some MEFISTA Early Stage Researchers attended an online Symposium on Digital Signal Processing in Optical Fiber Communication

25 October 2021, oragnised by sister EIDs REAL-NET and FONTE.

Speakers and topics are below.

– Sebastian RandelKarlsruhe Institute of Technology, “The role of digital signal processing in optical communications”
– Laurent SchmalenKarlsruhe Institute of Technology“End-to-end Optimization of Short-Reach Optical Communications Using Deep Learning”
– Christian HägerChalmers University, “Physics-Based Machine Learning for Fiber-Optic Communication Systems”
– Marco SecondiniSant’Anna School of Advanced Studies“New lower bounds on the capacity of optical fiber channels via optimized shaping and detection”
– Sebastien BigoNokia Bell Labs France“Brighter networks are smarter”
– Alan Pak-Tao LauThe Hong Kong Polytechnic University“Machine Learning for Fiber Nonlinearity Compensation”
– Maxim KuschnerovHuawei Munich“Signal processing evolution for the 1.6Tb/s generation of data center networks”
– Darko Zibar, TU Denmark“Towards intelligence in photonic systems”

More details here.

Mefista Technical Induction (2nd part), 9 September 2021

The MEFISTA Consortium met today for an update on progress and now that all Early Stage Researchers (ESRs) are on board, to complete the Induction started in part earlier this year.

MEFISTA Transferable Skills Workshop I (TSW I)

The upcoming event TSW I, was held remotely via Zoom, on 24-26th March 2021.

The workshop focused on presentation and communication skills, public engagement, writing for publications, open science and open access, all areas that are considered key competencies by the European Commission.

TSWI addressed ESRs from the MEFISTA project and other sisters projects POST-DIGITAL, REAL-NET and WON.

The main Speakers were: Rachel Won, Hannah Hickman and Srikanth Sugavanam.

For more information about the workshop please follow the link.

MEFISTA Induction (1st part)

The first part of the MEFISTA Induction took place on 24th February 2021, online remotely due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

This is the first training event out of 15 planned and foreseen network-wide training events within the MEFISTA project. The aim of this first introductory part was to get ESRs to know each other and to inform them about MEFISTA organisation, right and obligation of MSCA fellows, salary, planned secondments, etc…

All the 6 recruited ESRs participated in the event.