Working for Physical Sciences Inc. (PSI)

This blog is inactive since I have moved from industry to academia. I am currently working for Physical Sciences Inc.(PSI).

www.psicorp.com

PSI is a company with ~180 people and 4 subsidiaries, which provides contract research and development services in a wide diversity of technical areas to both government and commercial customers.

How to make awesome powerpoint presentation slides?

Whether you're in industry or academia, you'll need at some point to give a talk and/or make a powerpoint presentation. This is unavoidable! Even if you go for a job interview, you'll need to make a presentation and impress your future employers. And the audience's confidence in your abilities is generally proportional to how well you deliver your talk.

You need to learn to make neat slides for a start. I've seen lots of people who do good work but make horrible presentations. After the horrendous talk, their credibility goes down exponentially.

I can give a whole lecture regarding powerpoint slides but I'll cut to the chase.

Here are a few pointers:

1. Design your own template or buy them online. People are sick of seeing the same old powerpoint templates.

Use a white background (Colored backgrounds are distracting!). Go for a minimalistic design.

2. Use high quality graphics, logos and make some 3D illustrations.

Avoid making your powerpoint dull with low-resolution graphics and too many 2D images.

3. Cut down on text. Avoid crowded slides and use more graphics to get your message across.

4. Use some powerpoint custom animation (appear/disappear) to help the audience focus on some specific information on the slide.

Make information appear one at a time, if the slide is full of information. But don't go overboard on the custom animation.

5. Always use a powerpoint presenter.

It makes you look more professional! I always carry my Kensington presenter whenever I need to give a talk. It's old school using the page up/down button on a keyboard.


6. Check out Garr Reynolds (presentation guru!) presentation tips.

7. Rehearse...

You have to bear in mind that you have only one shot at it. Just one bullet so to speak, and you cannot afford to miss the target! So rehearse a few times before the actual event. Also, make sure that you're conveying your message.

When delivering the actual presentation, be enthusiastic about your talk and convey your enthusiasm!

Google Analytics and Readers Feedback

I've tracked the *success* (in terms of traffic) of this blog with Google Analytics. It's a very cool and comprehensive tool to monitor traffic on your website. And, it's FREE! Google Analytics gives you an enormous amount of information about web surfers.

I've had like 60% increase of traffic lately and it appears that my most popular post is about 'coloring SEM images'! So, I'm guessing that people are in dire need of practical tools (or codes) more than anything else. :)

I also received a lot of feedback from readers: People have been emailing me and asking me to give more advice rather than commenting on papers. Also, some readers want more scripts or codes. Some people asked me to comment on certain specific topics. Well, it's all good and I will try as far as possible to accommodate certain requests, but please bear in mind I have limited time (like everybody else!).

A number of people have requested that I allow anonymous commenting, as opposed to registered users. Typically, this opens doors to spammers, but I'll give it a shot anyway as from today. If it looks like the site is being nuked, I'll disable it.

Hack Proof your Network with RSA SecurID®

People have often asked me if it's possible to add an extra layer of authentication when tunneling (SSH) to a Linux server containing sensitive information. The problem comes from users who adopt weak and/or reusable passwords that hackers can easily retrieve.

Well, there's a very good solution: Purchasing RSA SecurID® authenticator(picture below) and software.



RSA SecurID® two-factor authentication is based on using your usual password when accessing a system, followed by input of some random number generated every 60 secs by an authenticator.

So, basically even if a hacker manages to guess a user's password, he must have the authenticator hardware at hand to get in the system. This makes it much harder for hackers to gain access to your network.

Worth the investment if you have to access classified information remotely!

On why it is important to maintain good relationships with people!

This post is an extension of the previous one on networking.

In academia or industry, influential people and talented people are all connected to each other. With this said, it is important to maintain very good relationships with everybody.

I always see people burning bridges with their former employees, grad students cursing professors, employees sending angry letters to companies who rejected them, researchers sending unprofessional emails to editors of scientific journals who trashed their articles, etc...

This is not good! You will realize that the top performers will always maintain a professional behavior. For instance, even if professors do not like each other, they would always be very polite and act with decorum. The top performers know very well that influential people are connected to other influential people, and unprofessional behaviors might "come and bite them in the ass later on"(the American expression for it!).

What I mean is that there might be a situation where you step on the toe of Mr X. Two years later you apply for a job and your hiring manager is Mr Z, who's connected to Mr X via Ms Y. And, you find out that they decline you you dream job, following a call from Mr X! I can cite countless examples like this.

Be always courteous! Try to have good working relationships with your colleagues, advisor, boss and everyone around you. Get genuinely interested in people. There will always be people who have difficult personalities, but you should never lose your cool or do something irrational that you might regret later on. Practice empathy and try to understand difficult people. But always smile and maintain a professional behavior!:)

Along the same lines, be a good Mensch, like Guy Kawasaki would put it!

The Art of Networking

I attended Peter Fiske's seminar at MIT recently. For those who do not know him, he is a well-known columnist for AAAS and he writes on career development for young scientists and engineers. He recently wrote a book entitled "Put Your Science to Work: The Take-Charge Career Guide for Scientists - Practical Advise, Proven Techniques".

One of the things that he talked about is the right way to network and this is exactly what I've been doing for years: He mentioned that many people have the misconception that networking means to contact everyone or influential people that you know when you are looking for a new job and asking if they know of any job openings!

I know people who would introduce themselves briefly to others and immediately flaunt their resumes. This is the wrong way of networking and the most likely outcome is that the other person would trash your CV.

Networking begins long before a job search. In reality, networking means that you have to get out of the lab and attend professional meetings or conferences, and meet people. Most importantly, you must have a genuine interest in the people that you meet (ask about their background, culture, hobbies, etc...). Also, you have to get interested in their work. It is important that you really want to know them personally and without expecting anything in return.

Once you've established a connection, you may keep in touch by sending an email from time to time. Send relevant articles or give a phone call!

Typically, if you have a genuine connection with people, they would help you when you need help. I always have a genuine interest in people and helped others (without expecting anything in return) whenever I could. And, this kind of attitude has always reaped rich rewards!

NPGS Dose Matrix Calculator

For the folks using Nabity's NPGS and building dose matrices for ebeam lithography, they know that some calculations are needed to figure out the real dose value of each element in the matrix.

I am sharing a small script which will simplify this process of doing these redundant calculations and which will allow users to focus more on the task at hand (i.e. the lithography process!).

Before running the executable file, the text file *array_calc.txt* has to be modified. rows,cols,start(%),end(%),start_dose need to be altered while preserving the "::" spacers.

The output file of the script will yield the dose allocated to different elements of the dose matrix and will reveal the dose variation. This script saved me a lot of time.

Hope you enjoy it!

[dose_matrix_dist_20100508.tar.gz]

The book "Bursts: The Hidden Pattern Behind Everything We Do"

Today I attended the "Cocktails & Conversation with prof. Albert-László Barabási" event. The purpose of the event was to celebrate Prof. Barabási's new book entitled "Bursts: The Hidden Pattern Behind Everything We Do".



Prof. Albert-László Barabási is a distinguished professor at Northeastern University and one of the world's top researcher in the science of networks. His group routinely publishes in Science/Nature!

There's something to learn here: Part of his appeal to the masses is that he delves in very interesting topics ranging from predicting human mobility, making forecast about mobile phone viruses (which do not exist yet!) to visualizing mood swings of the US population based on data from twitter. Basically, everybody (even a layman!) can relate to this. If only a specialized audience can relate to your obscure work, it's unlikely that you can become popular.

The other part is that it is a relatively new field and he's a pioneer who's making quantum leap progress.

In a nutshell, his research consists of gathering large data sets (e.g. data from anonymous mobile phone users), analyzing the data, generating models and making predictions.

I was able to catch a glimpse of his recent book and I have to admit that it's thought provoking. In short, the book, through some well-crafted stories, reveal the predictability in human behavior. Barabási introduces some seemingly unrelated activities and shows that a virtually identical bursty (this is where the name of the book came from!) pattern emerges. Worth reading!

You may also want to read Linked from the same author!

AAAS Booklet on Building Relationships

Building relationships with your colleagues and boss is critical to your survival in the lab! I am glad that the American Association for the Advancement of Science, "Triple A-S" (AAAS) has decided to focus on this issue in their latest booklet titled "Career Trends: Building Relationships".

The booklet can be downloaded here:

http://images.sciencecareers.org/pdf/booklets/building_relationships.pdf

As a bonus, the booklet discusses topics like informational interviews and online social networking sites to guide you through your career.

Review on Transformation Optics and Metamaterials

There's a very good review, by Huanyang Chen (who's also on the Physics advisory board of the Lifeboat Foundation) et al., on transformation optics /metamaterials which was published a few days ago in the journal Nature Materials:

Huanyang Chen, C. T. Chan and Ping Sheng. transformation optics and metamaterials. Nature Materials 9, 387 - 396 (2010) [...]

This review brings the reader up to speed on cloaking.

Protecting your Intellectual Property (IP) a.k.a No FREE Consulting

Q: What is the ultimate goal of companies?
A: Companies want to make money! Plain and simple.

And, in the economic downturn, they need to innovate to remain competitive. In other words, they need fresh ideas. Most of them don't need super qualified labor at this point in time since it would cost them too much. But, they are in dire need of ideas. Once they have a brilliant idea, they have or will find some engineer with a recent PhD (and those are a dime a dozen nowadays!) to execute the idea.

Some companies contacted me recently and introduced themselves in the following way (adapted):

"Good Morning Dr. Casse. We know that you're a renown expert in the field X. We would like to go in the direction X+DX and would like to have your opinion on it. How would you go about it? BTW, we had some problem with X+D3X for the past 6 months. Maybe you could offer us some insights into solving those problems? Since you have expertise in Y also, we'd like to know the challenges in doing Y+DX? etc...

We may have some openings coming up for somebody who's very talented and qualified as you. But for now, we would appreciate if you could share your expertise with us!"

Do they think that I'm dumb?:)

I was talking with my friend Dr. M. Azize from MIT and colleague R. Tavlykaev (independent consultant) who also shared how some companies have become very aggressive, shameless and unethical to gain a competitive edge.

Let's face it, this is a form of *FREE* consulting. Providing companies some form of clues will make them earn a lot of money and pointing them in the right direction will also enable them to save millions of dollars in doing some redundant trial and error. What's in for the *free* consultant? Nothing. These companies will patent ideas, make million dollars of profit and that's the end of it.

I will advise *freely* universities, opensource communities and non-profit organizations on a limited scope. But I'm not into free consulting for greedy companies who will give nothing in return. And neither should YOU because you have nothing to gain. There is no job prospect either: The companies use it as a bait to lure you. So, these companies, in general, will not contact professors directly (since professors are not that dumb!), but will instead target postdocs and research scientists to do the dirty work for them.

The moral of the story is to protect your intellectual property (IP) and be aware of the dirty game that some companies are playing.

Single-photon source from Diamond Nanowires

Nature Photonics recently covered the work of Lončar group's where the group together with colleagues in Germany reported efficient diamond nanowire single-photon source based on an array of nanopillars in diamond (~200 nm in diameter and 2 μm high).

This is a very good piece of work which will allow new technologies such as secure communication through quantum cryptography. The work has been featured on the cover of Nature nanotechnology.

More info can be found here:

Thomas M. Babinec et al. A diamond nanowire single-photon source. Nature Nanotechnology 5, 195 - 199 (2010)[...]

The marriage of carbon nanotubes and metamaterial

Zheludev's group combined carbon nanotubes (CNTs) with metamaterials to engage the resonant local fields in the vicinity of the metamaterial, leading to enhanced nonlinearity. This is a smart idea! Redshift of the plasmon absorption resonance was observed in the CNT-functionalized metamaterial.

More details can be found in this paper:

A. E. Nikolaenko et al. Carbon nanotubes in a photonic metamaterial. Phys. Rev. Lett. 104, 153902 (2010) [...]

Resonance Guided Wave Networks (RGWN) concepts

Harry Atwater's group is constantly innovating and recently came up with an interesting concept termed as "Resonance Guided Wave Networks (RGWN)". A RGWN is an optical materials design consisting of power-slitting elements arranged at the nodes of a waveguide network. A typical 2D waveguide network is composed of intersecting metal-insulator-metal waveguides. This type of structure exhibits photonic bands and band gaps at IR wavelengths, as well as localized resonances of Q~80 at telecommunications wavelength.

The full story can be found in the Phys. Rev. Lett paper by Feigenbaum and Atwater:

Eyal Feigenbaum and Harry A. Atwater. Resonant Guided Wave Networks. Phys. Rev. Lett 104(14), 147402 (2010) [...]

How to obtain a faculty position in an economic downturn?

This question comes up very often in academic circles. Because of the economic downturn, it has become non-trivial to obtain any kind of position, whether it is in academia or industry. It is a good time for employers but not a good one for prospective employees. The applicant pool is gargantuan nowadays and there are a lot of talents out there seeking jobs: With laid-offs all over the U.S., experienced hard-working Americans as well as foreign talents and fresh university grads are now all competing for the few jobs out there.

Just to give you a sense of reality, we placed an ad for a postdoc and we got around 400 applicants, ranging from experience industry laid-offs, university professors, mature postdocs and fresh PhD graduates all-together.

To come back to the question, there are a few basic requirements that an applicant has to meet:

(1) Good publications, preferably in high impact factor journals
(2) Postdoctoral research experience ranging from 3-5 years (or more?!)
(3) Teaching experience(desired)
(4) h-index > 5

These days, as mentioned above, there'll be a lot of people who will satisfy requirements (1)-(4). But the decisive factor to get hired is:

FUNDING. Schools prefer postdocs who wrote or co-wrote grant proposals and managed to obtain funding. If an applicant can bring his/her own research funding, they have statistically much higher chances of becoming a faculty member.

The most effective people have excellent time management skills

Nowadays, especially in the US, people are overburdened with work. Typically, most people are buried underneath paperwork and email. But my boss recently made a good observation: He mentioned that top performers can answer you almost immediately. The most effective people would usually be on top of things and possess excellent time management skills.

We noticed that the very top directors, professors, managers and other top executives would reply to any emails within a few minutes to at most a few hours. While those with poor time management skills have to be literally harassed over a few days to months before responding. Unfortunately, I have often encountered the latter!

But I have also had the chance to interact with top performers, at the top of their field, who managed to respond to my emails and also who gave me their cell number in case I didn't succeed in reaching them fast enough!

These are the kind of people whom you should consider working for and whom you should hire.

Also, this is the kind of professional behavior one should strive to cultivate.

Lecture on lithography

I just gave a 1 hour lecture on "lithography" for the INT G370 course: Nanosystems Design for Biology and Medicine.

As the old saying goes, it turns out that we learn much more by teaching a course. It's kind of refreshing as you have to dig up some of the old concepts locked inside your memory.

The moral of the story is to try to teach something once in a while!

Facebook for researchers: ResearchGATE

Dr. Ijad madisch created ResearchGATE which is a 'Facebook for scientists'. So far, ResearchGate has built a social network of more than 250,000 researchers from 196 countries.

One of the benefits of ResearchGate is that it is a centralized forum where people can ask questions or pose problems, and other scientists can answer them.

It's similar to starmind but for free!

Converting bitmap images to vector graphics for lithography

For presentations, I often show lithographically-made nanoscale images of logos, map of the USA, flowers, Mona Lisa, Obama pictures and other hard-to-make/creative designs!

While, in general, anybody doing lithography would show the usual lines or holes patterns and variations of it. So, I often get the question: "How did you make it? This is hard to draw in DXF (CAD) format!".

It's correct to say that it's hard to draw in DXF. But I don't draw them! I simply use high-resolution pictures on the web (raster graphics or bitmap) and convert the pictures to vector graphics.

To easily convert bitmap images to clean vector art, I use vector magic:

http://vectormagic.com/home

And voilà!

Na Liu won the best female young physicist in Germany (Hertha-Sponer Prize 2010)

In Germany, one of the groups that have been very successful in advancing metamaterials research, besides Wegener's group, is Harald Giessen's group in Stuttgart. I had the opportunity of meeting Harald Giessen in San Diego in 2008.

The best known works, of Giessen's group, are on Stereometamaterials and the Plasmonic analogue of electromagnetically induced transparency at the Drude damping limit.

And, the work contribution is largely attributed to Na Liu's effort. As a reward, the Hertha Sponer Prize 2010 of the German Physical Society for the best female young physicist in Germany has been awarded to her for her research into metamaterials.

Na Liu is now in Alivisatos group in UC Berkeley.

And of course, Europe has once again been brain-drained!:)

Want visibility: Create professional websites!

Nowadays, there is such fierce competition that lab PIs want more visibility. One of the ways to achieve more visibility for your lab and to display a high level of professionalism is to create a professional website.

All the bosses that I have worked for so far have stressed this fact and all hired professionals to design their websites:

Prof Frank Watt's center for ion beam application website:
http://www.ciba.nus.edu.sg/

Prof. Herbert Moser's Singapore synchrotron light source website:
http://ssls.nus.edu.sg/

Prof. Sri Sridhar's websites:
http://sagar.physics.neu.edu/
http://www.igert.neu.edu/

A website is a window to the world and making it look outstanding will also reflect on members of the lab.

David R. Smith who is the pioneer for metamaterials or microwave metamaterials (to be more precise!) is the guy who understands this and makes sure that his website always shine! He takes the habit of constantly revamping his website:

http://people.ee.duke.edu/~drsmith/

and making sure that web surfers get the message.

He has also a new website for his center for metamaterials and integrated plasmonics at Duke:

http://metamaterials.duke.edu/

The website has a nice feed aggregator, which captures the latest breakthroughs of the photonics community.

3D Magnetic EZ Antenna

After our breakthrough in super-resolution imaging, the other news which dominated the national scene is the electrically small and low-profile magnetic EZ Antenna by Richard Ziolkowski et al. [...] This work is a collaboration between the University of Arizona, Boeing Research and Technology, and NIST. To avoid being technical, this metamaterial-inspired, near-field resonant parasitic antenna has a much higher performance that other antennas with similar sizes.

And, quoting Christopher Holloway (NIST):

“The purpose of an antenna is to launch energy into free space. But the problem with antennas that are very small compared to the wavelength is that most of the signal just gets reflected back to the source. The metamaterial makes the antenna behave as if it were much larger than it really is, because the antenna structure stores energy and re-radiates it,”

The antennas developed by the group are printed on copper squares with sizes of only 65 millimeters. A Z-shaped element on their backs acts like a metamaterial, storing energy magnetically.


Image comment: This is the new. metamaterial-based antenna created by experts at NIST
Image credits: C. Holloway / NIST


Richard Ziolkowski is best known for his pioneering work, together with Ehud Heyman on wave propagation in media having negative permittivity and permeability [...]. While Minas Tanielian from Boeing is known for his 3D cubic arrangement of split ring resonators. On a personal note, besides being great researchers, Ziolkowski and Tanielian are very approachable and extremely efficient people.

3D Metamaterials Nanolens: The best superlens realized so far!

My paper was published online 2 days ago, in Applied Physics Letters:

B. D. F. Casse, W. T. Lu, Y. J. Huang, E. Gultepe, L. Menon, and S. Sridhar. Super-resolution imaging using a three-dimensional metamaterials nanolens. Appl. Phys. Lett. 96, 023114 (2010), DOI:10.1063/1.3291677 [...]



We have manufactured a three-dimensional (3D) metamaterials nanolens, consisting of bulk nanowires embedded in a dielectric matrix, which boasts significant advantages such as low-loss, broad bandwidth operation, and support for both propagating and evanescent waves required for full imaging, over currently available metamaterials prototypes. Additionally, It has a figure of merit which is 4 times higher than the best fabricated metallic-based metamaterial.

“This is probably the best superlens realized so far—In contrast to a grating far-field superlens, it needs only a single measurement to obtain a very large bandwidth in Fourier space to reconstruct superresolution details of an object. And, unlike the hyperlens, the metamaterial nanolens has theoretically no limitations on the imaging area.” says Sri Sridhar.

With this 3D nanolens, we have demonstrated superresolution imaging over a record distance of 6 times the wavelength (λ), in the far-field, with a resolution of at least λ/4. The superior optical properties of the lens and the ability to manufacture the bulk nanowires in large scale, offers the potential for numerous applications in biomedical imaging, transformation optics, optical storage devices and nanolithography.

The press release can be found here:
Northeastern University physicists develop nanolens that improves imaging of nanoscale objects

http://www.nanotech-now.com/news.cgi?story_id=36280

This work is profiled in several online journals.

The tragedy that hit Haiti

I believe none of us can be deaf to Haiti's worst earthquake in over 200 years, where thousands of people lost their lives and a countless number of others lost their homes.

It is important that we reach out to those in distress. In times like this, direct donations to legitimate organizations are the most helpful.

Debugging a segmentation fault on Linux

Several of our key softwares run on the opportunity Linux cluster at Northeastern. We have built a state-of-the-art facility for electromagnetic computation. One software that we recently installed gave us a segmentation fault.

It's been a while since I haven't done any troubleshooting in Linux. Well, I used to be the maintainer of the fedora YUM repository for Enlightenment E17 desktop shell, before passing it on to Prof. Gregory Kriehn.

I asked the administrator to install gdb and ran a backtrace. That gave me some useful debugging information to feedback to the software company.

Moral of the story: Use the force, use Linux!

Silveirinha and Alù: Rising stars of the metamaterials community

Talented individuals are easy to spot. And, we have to appreciate the talent and learn from them. Whenever I am searching for published theoretical papers, I stumble of course on the usual in-depth articles by experienced/mature professors but I also come across very good articles written by young talented professors.

Two such recent articles are:

[1] M. G. Silveirinha et al.
Experimental verification of broadband superlensing using a metamaterial with an extreme index of refraction. Phys. Rev. B 81, 033101 (2010) [...]

and
[2] A. Alù. Mantle cloak. Phys. Rev. B 80, 245115 (2009) [...]

Mário G. Silveirinha and Andrea Alù are both very talented young faculty members who have been extremely productive and publishing several papers a year for the past few years. Specifically, they have published a record number of theoretical papers.

Now, one may wonder how they managed to publish so many papers. Well, they first have a deep understanding of the underlying physics of metamaterials and see a mile ahead of everybody else. Second, they have developed robust simulation tools and in-house templates to chunk out papers rapidly as soon as they have a storyline. Basically, they are able to see the whole picture, but they don't publish it right away. They don't give you all the pieces of the puzzle in one shot! Rather, they break it down to small sub pictures, and publish each one at a time. As a result, they publish more than the average theoretical physicist.