Books of 2024: Final Part

Gazettabyte has been asking industry figures to pick their reads of 2024. In the final part, Professor Polina Bayvel, Hojjat Salemi, Professor Laura Lechuga, and the editor of Gazettabyte share their selections.

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Professor Polina Bayvel, Royal Society Research Professor & Head of the Optical Networks Group, Department of Electronic & Electrical Engineering, UCL

I recently attended a Royal Society Discussion Meeting where Leslie Valiant gave a brilliant talk on educability as a better definition than intelligence. A Harvard professor, he has developed many algorithms that underpin today's networks, including Valiant's load balancing. He is a profound thinker, and I wanted immediately to read his book, The Importance of Being Educable: A New Theory of Human Uniqueness.'

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The markets for photonic integrated circuits in 2030

What will be the leading markets for photonic integrated circuits (PICs) by the decade's end? And what are the challenges facing the PIC industry?

SiLC Technologies' Lidar PIC. Source: SiLC Technologies.

A panel session at the recent PIC Summit Europe event held in Eindhoven, The Netherlands, looked at what would be the markets for photonic integrated circuits by 2030.

The market for PICs is dominated by datacom and telecom. However, emerging applications include medical and wearable devices, optical computing, autonomous vehicles, and sensing applications for the oil, gas, water, and agriculture industries.

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The growing role of biosensors

Part 2: Professor Laura Lechuga, biosensor pioneer 

Professor Lechuga, a leading biosensor researcher, explains the challenges involved in developing medical biosensors and why, due to covid, the technology's time has come.  

Professor LechugaLaura Lechuga is a multideciplinarian. She read chemistry at university, did a doctorate in physics while her postdoctoral research was in electrical engineering. She has even worked in a cleanroom, making chips.

Group leader at the NanoBiosensors and Bioanalytical Applications Group at the Catalan Institute of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology (ICN2), Lechuga thus has an ideal background for biosensor research.

Biosensors are used for health, environmental, food control, veterinary and agriculture applications. They are used to test for chemical substances and comprise a biological element and an optical sensor.

Her initial focus was environmental biosensors but she quickly switched to medical devices, partly because of the great interest healthcare generates.

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