apertus° presentation at Exceptional Hardware & Software Meeting (EHSM)

We had a couple of great days in Hamburg, heard talks about interesting topics and met a lot of interesting people. And we got a grand tour of the particle accelerators which we all were so "physically attracted" to :) . DESY's primary task, since the research center was founded in 1959, was to investigate the smallest particles known at that time. Over the decades, DESY provided essential information and data to help solving the complex puzzle called particle physics. With the PETRA storage ring, researchers discovered the gluon, the glue-particle that holds the quarks together - without it there would be no atoms. Nowadays practically all particle physics research is done at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in CERN and the DESY facilities shifted their focus to the so called "photon science". Ultrafast processes, like those in a chemical reactions, require very short light pulses to take pictures at the atomic level - imagine a femto second x-ray flash light. DESY also houses a 14,000 CPU grid which is one of 140 grid locations permanently crunching through the huge amount of data almost constantly captured by the CERN LHC.

AXIOM stories

Above you can watch our presentation at EHSM in full length, and all the other talks are available via youtube on the EHSM channel. We had a number of very interesting discussions and gained a lot of insight on future use-cases for the AXIOM camera. For example we learned once again that astronomy has a huge demand for a proper high resolution camera system - like the AXIOM - because all the existing DSLRs lack easy control and more importantly the ability to preprocess the data before sending it to storage. We also heard a number of funny stories, for example, that our April fools video was well received by Allan Alcorn (the inventor of Pong) after he got a message from a scientist we met at EHSM, who also told us that she got to know Allan at a party in Silicon Valley. A very interesting request, that we did not consider before, was brought to us by another EHSM visitor: Secure 'One-way' encryption of video/still images of sensitive data captured by journalists and cameramen in war zones - the decryption key stays safely at home - no big deal with AXIOM. Of course, we also had a lot of fun participating in all the talks and events there, from bending glass over electron beam welding to playing with acrobatic robots. Once again, thanks to Sébastien Bourdeauducq and the many other people involved in EHSM for doing a great job organizing this event and Jürgen Starek for showing us quite interesting areas of DESY which kindly hosted the event at this very special place.

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