EuMC Plenary Session Details

Jean-Pierre Raskin, Louvain School of Engineering (EPL), Belgium

“Information Communication Technology for the best and the worst”

Abstract

Electronics is increasingly introduced in our society and ICT contributes extensively to this trend. Although this could enable positive effects both on our society and our environment through optimization and monitoring, the massive deployment of ICT comes together with an undeniable environmental burden which is often overlooked.

In the talk, we will begin by questioning the vision of progress shared by our societies. We will lift the veil on the invisibles of the digital world. It shows that the exponential trends such as Moore’s law or Cooper’s law will very unlikely lead to an absolute decrease of greenhouse gas emission and a reduction of our appetite for a wide variety of minerals if sobriety is not considered together with efficiency improvements.

Faced with the societal challenges of today and tomorrow, teaching and disciplinary research must reinvent themselves. Based on the assessed impacts of ICT, we will question the merits of certain technological choices made in the name of the transition. A holistic, transdisciplinary and pragmatic approach must be put in place in order to think, design and innovate within the constraints of our ecosystem limits. Concrete examples of current research will be shared, such as a critical look at the deployment of connected objects, the eco-design of sensors, a reflection on the pursuit of Moore's law and its environmental consequences, and the strategies to minimize e-waste.

Jean-Pierre Raskin received the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in applied sciences from Université catholique de Louvain (UCLouvain), Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium, in 1994 and 1997, respectively. In 1998, he joined the EECS Department of The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA, for a post-doc of two years. In 2000, he joined the Microwave Laboratory of UCLouvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium, as Associate Professor, and he has been a Full Professor since 2007. From September 2009 to September 2010, he was visiting professor at Newcastle University, Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK. His research interests are the modeling, wideband characterization and fabrication of advanced SOI MOSFETs as well as micro and nanofabrication of MEMS / NEMS sensors and actuators, including the extraction of intrinsic material properties at nanometer scale. He has been IEEE Fellow since 2014. He received the Médaille BLONDEL 2015, the SOI Consortium Award 2016, the European SEMI Award 2017, the Médaille AMPERE 2019, the Georges Vanderlinden Prize 2021 and the IET Achievement Medal in Electronics 2022, in recognition in his vision and pioneering work for RF SOI. He is author or co-author of more than 350 scientific journal articles. He has been managing a Chair in eco-innovation at CEA-Leti since January 2024.

David R. Smith, James B. Duke Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering Duke University, USA

Dr. David R. Smith is currently the James B. Duke Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Duke University. He is also Director of the Center for Metamaterials and Integrated Plasmonics at Duke and holds the positions of Adjunct Associate Professor in the Physics Department at the University of California, San Diego, and Visiting Professor of Physics at Imperial College, London. Dr. Smith received his Ph.D. in 1994 in Physics from the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). Dr. Smith's research interests include the theory, simulation and characterization of unique electromagnetic structures, including photonic crystals and metamaterials.

Smith is best known for his theoretical and experimental work on electromagnetic metamaterials. and has been at the forefront in the development of numerical methods to design and characterize metamaterials, and has also provided many of the key experiments that have helped to illustrate the potential that metamaterials offer. Smith and his colleagues at UCSD demonstrated the first left-handed (or negative index) metamaterial at microwave frequencies in 2000 followed up with a second experiment confirming one of Veselago's key conjectures: the 'reversal' of Snell's law. These two papers--the first published in Physical Review Letters and the second in Science--generated enormous interest throughout the community in the possibility of metamaterials to extend and augment the properties of conventional materials.

Since those first metamaterial experiments, Smith has continued to study the fundamentals and potential applications of negative index media and metamaterials. In 2004, Smith began studying the potential of metamaterials as a means to produce novel gradient index media. By varying the index-of-refraction throughout a material, an entire class of optical elements (such as lenses) can be formed. Smith showed that metamaterials could access a much larger range of design space, since both the magnetic and the electric properties could be graded independently. Smith and colleagues demonstrated several versions of gradient index optics, an activity that continues in his lab today. The introduction of controlled spatial gradients in the electromagnetic properties of a metamaterial flows naturally into the broad concept of transformation optics - a new electromagnetic design approach proposed by Sir John Pendry in 2006. To illustrate of the novelty of this design approach, Pendry, Schurig and Smith suggested in 2006 that an 'invisibility cloak' could be realized by a metamaterial implementation of a transformation optical design. Later that same year, Smith's group at Duke University reported the demonstration of a transformation optical designed 'invisibility cloak' at microwave frequencies. The concept of transformation optics has since attracted the attention of the scientific community, and is now a rapidly emerging sub-discipline in the field.