Computer Scientist Lost Amidst 7,000 Physicists!

"Transition" (lots of background noise, and a brief moment later), "gap" - well these were just a few words that I heard at Cafe Du Monde in the French Quarter a couple of nights ago while I was scarfing down some delicious begniets with my friend Mark who happens to be a New Orleans native. Why was I in the French quarter, you ask? I was attending the biggest physics conference organized by the American Physical Society - the 2008 annual March meeting (March 10 - 14).

I arrived in New Orleans with a colleague around eleven on Sunday night and I was lucky to be staying at Mark's parent's home for the duration of the conference. I presented a paper on how to encode a logical qubit into six physical qubits that I recently wrote up with four other colleagues. Mark Wilde presented his latest research on entanglement-assisted convolutional codes, and Martin Varbanov talked about hitting times on graphs with continuous walks. One of my colleagues, Ognyan Oreshkov was supposed to give a talk but he was unable to attend for he is working hard on writing up his dissertation. Fortunately Todd Brun took over and presented Ognyan's results on "Robustness of Operator Quantum Error Correction With Respect to Initialization Errors." The session on quantum error-correction was chaired by Lorenza Viola and I think she did a great job in time-managing the session. Each talk was scheduled for just ten minutes with two minutes of Q & A. Giving a talk in twelve minutes is hard and it is even harder when you have quite a lot to say. At one point during the talk I felt like words from my mouth were coming out faster than bullets from the barrel of a machine gun.

There were many parallel sessions going on throughout the week. The session that I found most interesting was on gravity and quantum information, where John Preskill talked about his new paper with Patrick Hayden on black hole physics and quantum information. Unfortunately due to Mark and Martin's late night partying I was not able to make it to Dave Bacon's talk on
"Quantum Computational Complexity in the Presence of Closed Timelike Curves." I am sure his talk must have been witty, insightful, funny and entertaining in the usual Dave Baconesque spirit. If you are interested, you can find the talk here. The talk IS entitled "crazytalk.ppt", so the reader is forewarned!

I also ran into an old friend, Matt Shaw, with whom I took quantum mechanics a few years ago. For some reason people kept asking whether we were brothers or related somehow. He has blond hair, blue eyes, while I have black hair and brown eyes, so at the end of the conference I was convinced that he and I were related. One of the highlights of the week was listening to Dixie-land jazz in Preservation Hall. The ticket was $10.00, the room very small with wood flooring, the panels to the entrance scratched with paint peeling off, and the air soaking with the "Big n' Easy" New Orleans attitude.

Between the jazz, Cajun food, stimulating talks, and wholesome family atmosphere at Mark's place, this conference was by far one of the best that I have attended in my life.

An Evening with John Lithgow and Carol Muske-Dukes

Last night I was typing up solutions to a recent homework for a discrete mathematics course. It was late, late afternoon, early evening and I was looking forward to spending an evening listening to John Lithgow and Carol Muske-Dukes at USC's Annenberg Center. The discussion between these two lovers of language was aptly titled, "The Theater of Language." John Lithgow was introduced by the dean of USC's theater school as a three time Emmy and a two time Tony winner actor and comedian. More importantly, she told us of his kind, and generous character. He had this air, this presence of a man who has lived and someone with great wisdom, wit and charm. He opened up by describing how he fell in love with a poem he had heard being recited when he was seven years old. He then got up from his chair and went to the podium and recited this poem with the finesse, courage, and mental fortitude of an experienced thespian veteran. Needless to say, the audience was spellbound. The recitation was by heart, and went on for a good ten minutes or so. It is no wonder then that he is a two time Tony winner. He read from his new book, entitled, "The Poet's Corner: The One-and-Only Poetry Book for the Whole Family", which is an anthology of his favorite poems.

Carol Muske-Dukes is a professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Southern California. She read some beautiful poems from her book of poems, entitled, "Sparrow". Apparently, Carol's late husband and John Lithgow were extremely close friends. She wrote "Sparrow" as an elegy for her late husband.

John Lithgow read from William Carlos Williams, Robert Frost, Walt Whitman, and some other noteworthy contemporary poets.

Seth Lloyd @ USC

I went to an interesting talk on campus today. Seth Lloyd who works in quantum information theory at MIT, spoke about his new paper, entitled, "Quantum Private Queries". Here's the problem description.

Imagine a communication scenario where you are given two parties, namely, Alice and Bob, who are spatially separated, let's say, and share a quantum communication channel. The latter just means that they can send quantum information between each other. Bob has access to a huge database. Alice would like to query Bob's database and retrieve an answer without Bob knowing the answer as well. If he cheats, she will come to know about it. Classically, a naive approach would be for Alice to send for example a million queries to Bob and Bob sends back a million answers from his database. One Alice gets the million answers she can look up the correct one. But you can see how this is inefficient. Quantum mechanically one can do the same in a very efficient manner. They get drastic reductions in communication and computational complexity. Later in the talk, he also touched upon how one can go about building a quantum random access memory (qRAM) device.

If you are interested in reading about the "Quantum Private Query" paper, you can find it on the arxiv here.

His qRAM paper is here.

Seth has also written a book, entitled, " Programming the Universe: A Quantum Computer Scientist Takes on the Cosmos." I had my copy autographed by him, heh heh. He was relating all these crazy stories where he was sitting in a hot tub with Sergey and Larry (Google founders) and talking about the quantum Internet.

Scott Aaronson on the "Limits of Quantum Computers"

I have been reading Scott Aaronson's article on "The Limits of Quantum Computers". He has posted a rough draft of this article on his blog (Shtetl-Optimized) here. This article was originally intended for Scientific American. You can buy an online version at the Scientific American website here.

Jacaranda @ First Presbyterian

Last Saturday (02/16/08), I found myself at the First Presbyterian Church on second street in Santa Monica, listening to some beautiful classical music being performed in an exquisite space. Jacaranda is a music program of the First Presbyterian Church and their program includes both classical and modern music. I was first introduced to this series by my dear friend Sarah Thornblade, and I have been attending this series on and off for three years now.
I am particularly excited about this series right now because they will be performing Olivier Messiaen's important works for the next two years. They will also be performing the works of composers who influenced him. For instance, last Saturday's performance included Isaac Albeniz's "Ferez from Iberia", Modest Mussorgsky's "Pictures at an Exhibition", and Peter Tchaikovsky's "Trio in a minor, opus 50". The first two pieces were in piano and the last one was a trio of piano, cello and the violin. USC's Joel Pargman played the violin, while the piano in the first two pieces was beautifully played by Eduardo Delgado.
The sanctuary within the church has been renovated and looks fresh, clean and very classy. I was a little saddened to see that the old mid-century-modern furnishings were no longer there to greet the audience, but I guess you just have to let go of some things in life. I highly recommend this series if you are a lover of contemporary-classical music.

An Afternoon With Alan Alda and K.C. Cole

As a child, I grew up watching Alan Alda play the quirkly, and eccentric character of Hawkeye Pierce on the hit TV series M*A*S*H (Mobile Army Surgical Hospital). So I was elated when I read on the USC homepage that he would be chatting with K.C. Cole, who happens to be a science journalist par excellence. I was a bit dismayed when I read that the discussion was scheduled for the afternoon rather than the evening. In any case, Bing Theater was quite full.
Apart from talking about his new book ("Things I Overheard While Talking to Myself"), Alan Alda mentioned his fascination for science and how and why one should try to distill complicated scientific ideas and bring them to the general public. He was insightful, witty, articulate and sharp. Both Alan and K.C. emphasized the importance of the confluence of art, science and society. Alan also related quite a few stories from Richard Feynman's life and his experience creating the play "QED". I had the opportunity to talk to him for a brief moment after his book-signing. It was such a delight to hear him talk about how important it is for scientists to show love and passion when they are explaining their ideas in a talk or otherwise. As I heard him I couldn't help but tell myself that this guy really loves science and has a passion and the curiosity to know and understand it. Never be afraid to ask the simple questions, no matter how stupid you may look in someone's eyes. For you never know what kind of floodgates, answers to such questions might open up for you in your mind.
The discussion was part of USC's Vision and Voices series which is trying to bring the spirit of Arts and Humanities together.

"The Universe" on the History channel

I happened to catch the show "The Universe" on the History channel during the holiday break. About half way into the show the narrator started talking about cosmic wormholes, white-holes and other exotic astrophysics stuff, when lo and behold I saw the familiar face of Clifford Johnson from the USC physics department. I highly encourage reading Cliff's blog "Asymptotia". I watched two episodes of "The Universe" and they were both tastefully done.