NIWeek 2012 presents Big Physics summit

National Instruments launches its 2012 technology summit in Austin, Texas this week.
NIWeek 2012, which starts tomorrow (August 7), will include a keynote presentation from White House Science and Technology Office advisor and Georgia Institute of Technology professor, Dr. Thomas R. Kurfess.
The three-day conference will include presentations on a range of topics including energy technology, RF and communications, vision, aerospace and defence, big physics, and robotics.
The Science and Big Physics summit brings together scientists and engineers from major national and research labs to discuss topics in the areas of control, measurement and diagnostics for particle accelerators, synchrotrons, fusion reactors and telescopes.

There are presenters from facilities such as Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory and CERN.
Polar explorer and renewable energy champion, Robert Swan, will host a session on reducing social disparity and environmental impact through innovation in emerging countries.
“Attendees will have an opportunity to hear from some of the world’s foremost thought leaders in science and technology,” said Ray Almgren, v-p of marketing for core platforms at National Instruments.
There will also be new product launches for National Instruments' modular design and test platforms and its LabView design software tools.
“LabView is at the heart of what we do, from controlling Lego to the Large Hadron Collider,” said Alex Davern, chief operating officer of National Instruments.
For Davern, modular instruments can be more cost-effective because they do not have the built-in redundancy of box instruments. “You do not buy eight of everything to get the high speed A-to-D which is what you really want,” said Davern.
NI started as a supplier of data capture cards and then moved in to developing test and measurement systems. More recently it has applied its same philosophy of reusable software in to embedded development systems.
For Davern, the trigger for the move into embedded design has been the FPGA, and NI has developed close technology links with suppliers such as Xilinx.
“FPGAs are the disruptive technology in this market,” said Davern.
“Our platforms do not compete with programmable logic firms, we compete with a customer’s internal tools and design cycles, and for us the heart of it is again LabView,” said Davern.
“I believe we have potential to bring even higher value to the embedded space than we do to the test and measurement space,” said Davern.