FACSS 2009 Wrap-up

Once again, the Federation of Analytical and Spectroscopy Societies conference, FACSS 2009, has drawn to a successful close. As usual, Eigenvector was there with a booth in the trade show, short courses, and talks.

We were very pleased at the popularity of our Chemometrics without Equations (CWE) and Advanced Chemometrics without Equations (ACWE) courses this year. CWE, led by our Bob Roginski, was at capacity with 20 students. I headed up ACWE, which was nearly full with 17. The courses were hands-on and gave the students a chance to test out the newest versions of our software, the soon to be released PLS_Toolbox 5.5 and MIA_Toolbox 2.0. Thanks to all who attended!

Our Jeremy Shaver gave two talks in the technical sessions. The first, “Soft versus Hard Orthogonalization Filters in Classification Modeling” provided an overview of numerous methods for developing filters. The bottom line is that all of the methods considered, including Orthogonal Signal Correction (OSC), Orthogonal PLS (O-PLS), Modified OSC (M-OSC), External Parameter Orthogonalization (EPO), and Generalized Least Squares weighting (GLS) perform very similarly.

Jeremy also presented “Analyzing and Visualizing Large Raman Images,” which was a joint work with Eunah Lee and Andrew Whitley of HORIBA Jobin Yvon, plus our own R. Scott Koch. This talk presented a method for doing PCA on multivariate images for situations where the entire data set cannot fit into computer memory. “Sequential PCA with updating” was shown to produce a very close approximation to conventional PCA. This is one potential strategy for dealing with the huge imaging data sets that are becoming increasingly common.

We’d like to thank the organizers of FACSS for another great meeting. We’re looking forward to the next one in Raleigh, NC, next year!

BMW