Open Access
Add to BibSonomyAbstract
We introduce the Optics Express special issue from the 39th European Conference on Optical Communication and Exhibition (ECOC). This issue consists of expanded papers selected to represent the best presentations from the six subcommittees of ECOC 2013.
© 2014 Optical Society of America
The 39th European Conference on Optical Communication and Exhibition took place in London from 22 September to 26 September, 2013. ECOC is Europe’s leading conference on optical communications and is one of the world leading events for presenting scientific progress, new developments, and major innovations related to optical communications. The event took place at the ICC London ExCeL in the United Kingdom.
ECOC 2013 brought together over 5500 people (1076 conference delegates and 4483 exhibition visitors) with backgrounds ranging from basic research and industrial R&D to telecom operators. The 238 oral presentations and 124 poster presentations were carefully selected by the ECOC Technical Program Committee from 801 submissions. Furthermore, the program included five plenary presentations, six tutorial presentations, 39 invited papers, six workshops, and two symposia that focused on indoor optical networks and energy consumption of the Internet. The technical program of ECOC was completed with 20 post-deadline presentations reporting last-hour breakthroughs.
The ECOC technical program was put together by the program chairs, six senior subcommittee chairs, and a technical program committee with 92 experts in their fields from across the world. The topics of the six subcommittees are:
- SC1. Fibers, Fiber Devices, and Amplifiers, chaired by Periklis Petropoulos (University of Southampton, UK)
- SC2. Waveguide and Optoelectronic Devices, chaired by Graeme Maxwell (CIP Technologies, UK)
- SC3. Subsystems for Optical Networks and Datacomms, chaired by Seb Savory (UCL, UK)
- SC4. Point to Point Transmission Systems, chaired by Ekaterina Golovchenko (TE SubCom, USA)
- SC5. Optical Transport and Large Scale Data Networks, chaired by Andrew Lord (BT Innovate & Design, UK)
- SC6. Access, Local Area and Data Center Networks, chaired by Albert Rafel (British Telecommunications, UK)
In 2011, the first ECOC special issue was published in Optics Express, disseminating the papers through a high Impact Factor and open access journal. Authors benefit from extending and improving their papers based on feedback from their presentation at the ECOC conference and the Optics Express peer review input. Following the success of the 2011 publication, a special issue from ECOC 2012 was also published in Optics Express. The ECOC 2013 organization was happy to continue this initiative but to limit its scope to a subset of the top papers by inviting approximately 80 ECOC authors to submit to the feature issue. Forty-nine of those authors decided to submit an extended version of their ECOC paper for publication in the Optics Express special issue. Many of the articles are published in the January 13 issue of Optics Express, but some will appear in upcoming regular issues as they are completed. All articles will be listed in the ECOC special issue Table of Contents.
This special issue would not have been possible without the efforts of the subcommittee chairs, who dedicated their time to serve as Optics Express guest editors. We thank them for their work. They are pictured in Fig. 1below:
Fig. 1 The organizers and editors of the ECOC 2013 special issue are pictured here: (a) Ekaterina Golovchenko, (b) Andrew Lord, (c) Graeme Maxwell, (d) David Payne, (e) Periklis Petropoulos, (f) Albert Rafel, (g) David Richardson, (h) Seb Savory, (i) Dimitra Simeonidou, (j) Will Stewart.
We would also like to thank the 65 anonymous reviewers, who were instrumental in carrying out the technical review of all the special issue manuscripts. We greatly appreciate your support.
It has been a pleasure for us to collaborate with many wonderful volunteers to organize the 2013 ECOC conference.
