 This meeting is being recorded as you as you can tell it's a meeting is now being reported. Hey, right. Yeah. Welcome. This is an activity of the Abdul Salam International Center for Theoretical Physics based in Trieste. We've had this optics college for many, many years dating back to the times of Galliano DiNardo. And it's always been in person. And then the pandemic came. It's been annual. It's a wonderful activity. We've changed the topic every year. And so we've had lots of we've made lots of friends. It's people from many countries, usually at least three dozen countries per year have been represented at the college. So this year is it's going to be on LiDAR applications in theory of LiDAR. LiDAR is very important is you're going to you're going to hear from Joe and other speakers tomorrow. But it but it's a remote sensing method that actually has a lot of applications and very important to the sustainable development goals of the United Nations. And I think it's in this very abbreviated college, you're really in for a treat because you're going to learn from the experts. And so anyway, we'll get on to that a little bit later. I'm going to show you the program I share my screen. This may be okay, snooze. All right. So if you see this, this is the this is the program we've got. So today is a special day. Today is the International Day of Light. And we're going to we're going to have three speakers talking about sort of best practices in a number of areas that I think are very important for us. One is in outreach and gender equality or equity in Pakistan. And this applies everywhere in the world. So and Rana Ashraf will be talking about that. Then John Freddie from Columbia, we'll be talking about optical encryption and optics in general in Columbia. And then our own Humberto Cabrera here at ICDP will be talking about various research opportunities at ICDP in our optics lab. And so the optics lab is something that has grown in recent years. It's actually it's become a very vibrant, vibrant research laboratory. And Humberto is going to tell us all about that. But I want to plug one organization in particular. And that's SPIE, the International Society for Optics of Atonics for having enabled us to really start the research laboratory activities here at ICDP, which we didn't have on campus these past years. So we have it here on campus. And it's a wonderful opportunity for career development. Anyway, I won't steal Humberto's thunder. He's going to talk about that. Then tomorrow, this is an online activity. So we're trying to keep it light. The unusual start time by P.M. Central European summertime is to try to make it available across the globe, including in Latin America and in the Far East. So anyway, some people have a little better times than others, but this is this is our compromise. And really, we're concentrating on what we think are really interesting lectures for you to get a sense for what's going on with LiDAR. So you'll see Joe Shaw, who you just heard. We'll be talking tomorrow on LiDAR for autonomous vehicles and atmospheric LiDAR, and then we'll move Wednesday to Insect and Fish LiDAR, which is my thing that's really intriguing me. And Photon County, a compressive LiDAR from John Howe at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. And John Howe for those who may not know as the president of the International Commission for Optics. And then we'll have Randall Bobbitt talking about coherent LiDAR and digital holography. And Thursday, and then we have some time for some short talks. And those short talks are from you. So I'm going to be getting together with some of our other organizers, and we'll be sending out some notes to you, the participants, to see if you'd like to give a talk. Some of you send in research abstracts. So any rate, we're going to get to that. All right. So that's generally the way it's going to work. It's four days. It starts today and ends on Thursday. So the other thing I'd like to do is just mention this. So I'm going to... Okay. So today is the International Day of Light 2022. It's been going on since 2018. And the International Day of Light was... I'll just go to the next slide. It was really a... It's a way to do what the year of light did in 2015, namely to raise awareness of importance of light-based technologies for many challenges we face in society. And we've reached many people in many countries. And over the years, it's really been wonderful. This year is no exception. Many, many wonderful activities. And some of you here also have submitted activities. This activity is part of our celebration. So any rate, it's a way to keep this going. Because optics, as many of you know, isn't enabling... Light sciences are really enabling technologies. And there's a lot that they can do to make this world a better place to live. So some of the impact over the four international days that we've had so far, you can see quite a few activities, 1,900 events in 103 countries and worldwide, meaning global events. And the various... You can see on the right, they can break down variously from science-themed conferences to citizen science and competitions, etc. So anyway, everything is game. It's a chance to not only celebrate science, but also art. Anything or light to philosophy, anything where light comes in. And you can see our steering committee members at the bottom. These are organizations which have been contributing to this campaign ever since we started. And so many thanks to them. And here's just a few of the things, the technologies that really help with the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Some of those are on the left, hunger, health, education, and affordable and clean energy. So there are many, many technologies that can, from the light sciences, and really play a key role from the LEDs that allow... Blue LED, which actually allowed cheap white light and affordable white light in many remote communities around the world, to water purification. There's spectroscopy of food security and safety, etc., and not to mention just full of the takes and also just making lighting energy efficient, urban gardening. There's a whole host of wonderful approaches and two to four light sciences to help with society. And we're trying to celebrate all those things during this day, every day, every year on May 16th. So finally, I just want to say that we've got, every year we've had a message from the Director General of UNESCO, Ms. Audrey Azulay. And this year is no exception. This is not the full message. Full message, you can go to the UNESCO website, but this is part of it. And again, from the Director General. And so it's a real privilege and a pleasure that she has taken the time to write this message. And you see, she says, without light, our planet would be a better golden barren place. Indeed, where there's light, there's often an abundance of light. Yet light represents even more for humanity, like those hand-in-hand with knowledge. It is a lens through which to see and understand the world. And so that's the idea that light has even more than what we consider as a scientific enterprise. It actually has a metaphorical meaning also for knowledge and a lot of other things. So including the artist, the wonderful artist that always show up to our events. So anyway, that's a brief description of the year of light. I'm going to stop sharing. It's been wonderful to do this over the years. So now I think we can go ahead with our program. So again, these are sort of best practices. I'd like to introduce the first speaker unless anybody has a question. So anyway, the first speaker is Dr. Imrana Ashraf. Actually, it turns out that Imrana was the first Pakistani woman to do her PhD in quantum optics. She's a professor in Department of Physics at Kadi Azim University in Islamabad. And I've known Imrana for many years. She's been here at the ICDP Optics College, starting out as a tutor. But then eventually, she was also lecturing in what we call the preschool, which is a school which allowed some students to kind of gear up for the college. It was a very important function. Imrana is a senior member of Optica, a senior associate at the ICDP. She's the recipient of the ICO ICDP Galliano DiNardo Prize. She won the Spirit of Salam Award at ICDP, which recognizes people who act in the spirit of Abdu Salam, the late Nobel Laureate. And she's done a number of things with teaching, but especially she's done, she's been very active in Pakistan in bringing Optics Educational Outreach to young students in government colleges, schools, not necessarily the private schools, but really the public schools, and especially in the remote areas, and especially for women students. So at any rate, it's been wonderful working with Imrana and she's going to describe some