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) [...]