Marking Weekends and EQuaLS Forum

The past few weekends have been full of marking activities. I'm pretty stressed out with the tasks and at times I went into a slight depression. The student clients ('bosses') kept asking when will they get their results and my fellow colleagues also asking the same, on behalf of their own students. In a way, I have started to regret my trip to Thailand. Not only have it caused financial stresses (yes, I know, my own doing) but it also came at the busy period of marking. By going to the conference, it had caused further delay of my marking (not helping with the expectations of current job). As I have commented before, what was I thinking when I accepted the invitation. Perhaps I have attached too much importance of my participation as a Malaysian representative to the conference (nobody really cared or noticed, right?). Thinking back, will there be any difference with my participation in the conference with the otherwise situation of my absence from the conference. Back to the marking, I have actually delayed marking scripts of my own group of students (to their displeasure) and gave priority to the scripts of the students of my colleagues. Of the two subjects, Linear Algebra was the one harder to mark particularly those involving row reduction procedure since there are many ways to do them (some perhaps not considered by the marking scheme). I have finished my marking of Linear Algebra, and now I am left with just scripts of my Applied Calculus students, which I hope to finish this weekend.

Yesterday, after my replacement class at XMUM in the morning, I drove to UPM for EQuaLS2024. I was invited to the forum in the afternoon. I was told that I should share my experience of building the quantum research ecosystem.

I started off by saying what I have done (the so-called 30 years) can only be of historical note, but what is more important how we forge the path ahead. The EQuaLS series is part of this history, a continuation of the lecture series  I initiated in ITMA (TSL Expository Lecture Series). When I renamed it to EQuaLS, I was actually asked the reason why I did not name the lectures after the name of the lab. Having experienced being moved from one institute to another, and then from one lab to another, I thought it was best to name it appropriately after the research theme that it should carry. In this way, the lecture series is independent of the hosting institute and laboratory. Indeed, there was the vision of EQuaLS could be a national event, that may be held by a different university. It almost did until the intended organizer backed off. In the forum, I explained the intent of the lecture series is to bring us to the level of international experts with enough mathematical sophistication and maturity and of course, this could take years. Without such level, no one will take us seriously and it is highly unlikely for us to progress without substantial amount of acceptance of the relevant (international) community.

The other thing we did, mentioned in the forum for a historical note is our regular weekly meetings, that we called QuEST.

The point of the meeting is to allow members to share what they have read or worked on with other members. This inculcates a culture of critical discussions among members, which would be necessary steps to attain the mathematical sophistication and maturity mentioned before. The other problem is the fact we have limited reading capacity, while thousands of publications being produced daily. So if we  wanted to be well-rounded and be aware/on top of current issues being discussed, then we need to distribute the 'responsibility' of reading/reporting among the members. Perhaps another matter that can be instilled with the weekly meetings is the sense of urgency in facing research. Having said all this, a danger would be falling into the trap of having meetings for the sake of meetings. Every now and then, there should be some form of renewal of the spirit of these meetings. So a good thing to have (which we did not do), is to assess the situation at some regular intervals.

All of the above points raised seem to be out of synch with the topics raised by the other panel members; they touched upon policies, working papers, financial issues. If ever some criticise what I have raised is too idealistic or emotive or whatever, I can also retort that some of the issues raised are really like putting the cart before the horse, when we are still facing very basic issues. However, the point here is not to put anyone down; everyone's contribution should be welcomed, particularly when the meet is meant to foster collaboration among us. In any case, we do need realizable actions from all these discussions, so that whatever being discussed does not end with the forum itself.

At some point in the discussions, I did raise my concern of unhealthy attitude that may take place while pursuing these quantum agendas. With the recent attention of the government on quantum technologies, there may be tussle about who should take lead. This may happen when personal agendas are placed above the overarching national agenda. Ideally, everyone should be leading in areas that they are familiar with. Opportunities should be open to all with complementary contributions from each group. Dreaded are ideas of sabotage or wanting others to fail; if there are any, then rightfully such persons should be shunned from the collaborative efforts. I also stressed the fact that no single person can carry the quantum agenda for the country on his/her own; we need all the help/contribution that we can get. I hope that by saying this, I will not offend anyone but it is a sincere thought from me.

After the forum, I met me with my junior colleagues. As a follow-up to the forum, I did say that we need to come up with some coherent direction for the group, something that we could say to the world, these are our contributions. It is quite easy to say that we need to work on topics that are close to experiments, but what precise is that? Perhaps using the Thailand experience, we should turn the question around, we need experimentalists to work closely with theorists. The cooperation between theorists and experimentalists should be organic and this takes time (maybe we give, say another five years?). During the forum, I did point out that Singapore had started off with high energy physics in the beginning (80s). It was only later (90s) that they turned to quantum foundations and quantum information with topics like Bell inequalities and qutrits, before they arrive to where they are now.

It was nice to meet with my junior colleagues. I left the place feeling rather estranged, not knowing my future. I wish my younger colleagues all the success and hope that they can carry out the national quantum agenda successfully.

Day 4 of Krabi Trip & Travelling Home

On the fourth day of the conference, my family decided to go for island hopping trip but the morning weather seems prohibitive and the family decided to postpone the trip till the weather is better. In a way this is good for me since I can then attend the last session of the conference as well as go with the family for the island hopping trip later in the afternoon. Also, I was feeling slightly under the weather since the kayaking experience and feeling almost feverish, which I had hope will decrease as the day goes by.

The morning keynote was given by Rodney van Meter who spoke on Networks for Quantum Modular System. I remembered in the early days of quantum computing, downloading his PhD thesis - it was not quite the usual quantum computing literature that I've been reading as it focuses more on the possible architecture for quantum computing. The talk was in a similar vein; he made his cool, interesting slides available to the participants by putting a QR code in his presentation but unfortunately I could not take a snap shot in time. Had the opportunity to have a little chat with him during one of the coffee breaks and was guessing that I am from Malaysia (perhaps he was there in my talk). He told me that he had once went to Malaysia for an Intel-sponsored conference but his experience then was limited to the airport and hotel room, without ever seeing much of Malaysia. I told him that he should come back to Malaysia again, hopefully in better circumstances.

The next talk is by Sylvain Gigan on quantum optics with complex media. He was likening complex media as a swiss-knife of optical devices. He recommended Nature Physics articles for an overview of the subject. After the coffee break, there was another keynote talk by Anthony Laing on advances in photonic quantum computing, within which he also describe some similar vibrational spectroscopy topics covered by Kwek earlier. The next two talks was by Thailand researchers, one on subsystem coding for quantum communications by Theerapat Tansuwannont and the other on quantum communication progress in Thailand by Poompong Chaiwongkhot. The latter seems to be very active during the conference is a member of QTFT (of which Areeya is a co-founding member). From all these, I see that Thailand has made substantial steps for building an ecosystem of quantum science & technology. I hope that Malaysia can do the same - we have been talking about these for years now and we need more substantive progress.

After the closing session of the conference, I wanted to thank Areeya in person but she was busy. I approached Narakorn Kaewkhao who was there throughout the conference and who had waited all day long for us to arrive. It was only after arriving home that I've learned that he is interested in cosmology and gravity. Here are photos of me with him.

Also before I left, Islam Jubaidul Tanveer gave salam to me (was surprised then) and introduced himself as representative of SEAQuantum. I told him that I am aware of SEAQuantum will be participating in this year's EQuaLS. I guess he did not know that I was from UPM and had started EQuaLS many years back. Here is my photo with him.

Immediately after, my family and I went to buy tickets for the island hopping adventure. I had my phone in the trackbottom I was wearing, thinking that it would be safe at that height. As we were trying to climb up the boat, the sea water was already at our waist level (not realizing that this will cause problem). On the boat, I tried to quickly wipe the phone dry but it was too late; the camera had already stopped working. The same happened to the phone of my youngest son. The rest they had put their phone in a sling bag (above their waist) and also had a water protective cover. Lesson learned: Buy the necessary accessories there and not regret thereafter. Some photos and videos below.

After the island hopping trip, we were extremely tired and we decided to finish whatever food stock that we had left. At night, my other half and sons decided to make another final visit to Aonang Night Market and also get food for our dinner.

I can't even remember what I had for dinner since I was too tired. The next morning, we were ready with our bags packed and had our final breakfast at the hotel. We took a Grab van to the airport thereafter. At the airport, we made a collection of our Thai currency to pay for our luggage. Boarded the plane around 12 noon and reached KLIA at around 3pm. I was feeling feverish perhaps out of exhaustion and back pain. Reached home around 5pm and took the rest needed.

Days 2 & 3 of Krabi Trip

Before writing on our Days 2 and 3 of our Krabi trip, let me post the group photo of the conference and photos of my presentation taken by the organizers.

I was curious about how my talk is perceived by others. The contents of the talk have not yet been published (and I don't have funds to do so) and some calculations have not been finished. But I'm pretty certain that these ideas have not been discussed before and hence my curiosity of people's reactions. Pretty sure that some would have doubts about them (even some of my students think that way) but in the past, I have pushed back against this stereotype of being local and unestablished, our ideas are doubtful and may not worth considering; when our work gets published, it got cited by someone beyond our circle. I did see people discussing when I presented them and the chairperson did ask something regarding the approach taken. The pic below shows the chairperson.

Having done my presentation on the first day, I'm now more relaxed and was simply listening to the talks given, looking out for ideas. Day 2 had Mile Gu giving a talk on quantum agents and non-Markovianity. There are claims about 'duality' between memory/information capacity and agents, hence some energy advantage of having quantum agents that I thought was interesting. Francesco Buscemi gave the talk next on quantum correlator and was introduced as one of the recipient of the Birkhhoff-von Neumann prize. He pushed back against the idea of ad-hockery (a term that seems to get the attention of someone) and appeal to authority, recommending to take approaches to problems anew. Marco Tomamichel spoke next on bandit algorithm (first time hearing this) solving problems of exploration versus exploitation (seems familiar) and minimizing regret function.

The next two talks were from CQT-ians of Singapore. First was Rainer Dumke, speaking about quantum sensing and his gravimetric applications. Next was Kwek himself speaking about boson sampling with applications in vibronic spectroscopy and Franck-Condon factors. A day later, over breakfast, he told me about the boson-sampling chip that they were developing and that this can be repurposed for neural nets (were discussing about AI and quantum computing solution for energy problems of AI). For the talks after lunch, I gave it a miss mainly because of me getting tired and thought of bringing my family out to lunch. We had lunch at some halal eatery near the Aonang Mosque. So our meals were usually the breakfast at the hotel/resort and late lunches cum dinner to cut down expenses.

Later that night, I went over to the conference dinner and sat with Yap and his wife, and was later joined by a Russian participant Anastasiia Nikolaeva from Russian Quantum Center. 

Kwek was an adjacent table with Rainer Dumke. So we had also photos together.

I also took photos with Dr. Areeya Chantasri who actually contacted me on behalf of the organizer.

The organizers made the event more joyful by including games like Schrodinger's chair where some notes are being put onto the chairs of the attendees randomly (not sure what was being written) and 'a winner' was announced. Somewhat like coding games was also done out of our names and letters from SQST. We were also asked to participate with a community 'dance' romvong led by Dr. Areeya, where everyone got up. Kwek said to me let's do some exercises (I hope there will be no awkward photos of me). There were music and finally karaoke where even Dr. Areeya sang. 

When she asked me if I would like to sing, I politely declined. Not sure who else sang because I left after taking photos with her. Later Kwek told me there was even a fire show at the end.

Day 3 started off with a small breakfast chat with Kwek. I told him that the Thai quantum community is larger than the one in Malaysia. He told me that the build-up of ecosystem started around five years ago when students are being sent off to their graduate studies abroad and came back to start their own programmes. For some reason (was thinking in my mind), the work that we do in Malaysia has not gel that well. There seems to be cultural obstacles but Kwek said, the culture can change and it must be pushed. We failed to attract talents and they went abroad instead. Did try to get a student of Kwek, Ajay Gopinathan (even with recommendation from Artur Ekert) to join us but was unsuccessful and he left for Google instead. Currently, I see a lot of in-breeding, which I think is not healthy despite the advantage of building certain strength. In any case, there are opportunities now as the awareness of quantum technologies among decision-makers grow. With the incoming Year of Quantum Science & Technology and our ASEAN chairmanship, we need to pool our resources together to create more opportunities and make our venture successful. Thailand was a good example to study, where they had scientists from different areas like materials science to work together in pushing the quantum science & technology direction. This, I say, not from pushing personal glory but viewing the possible impact of the new quantum frontiers. Having said that, Kwek told me to get back into the mainstream academia. Well, I leave this to the decision-makers. 

The first keynote speaker of Day 3 is Radim Filip who talks about non-Gaussian light. I have been reading about non-Gaussian resources likening these with magic states from this article and was hoping to incorporate this into my talk (did include it in my abstract) but never got quite to it as there were problems unsolved. Next was Howard Wiseman speaking on laser coherence and Heisenberg limit. Wiseman was Areeya's postdoc supervisor before she went back to Thailand. This is followed by Nicolas Trep's talk on parameter estimation in optics. After the coffee break, it was the talk of Andrew Jordan on continuous measurement and quantum trajectories. I did not know before this that Jordan was Areeya's PhD supervisor. He also mentioned about his book with Irfan Siddiqui. David Arvidsson-Shukur of Hitachi Labs, Cambridge spoke next on agnostic phase estimation. The final talk of the day is Sukrit Sucharitakul from Chiengmai University speaking on quantum dots (materials science).

After lunch, the participants get to do island hopping excursion. The family however had a kayaking excursion planned. Here are some pics:

I found that I can't do much of this activity since it actually hurt my back. sometime before even midway, I told my son I'm experiencing severe back pain. In the end, I found myself lying in the kayak as I can no longer stand the pain and my son rowed me back to the starting place. Rested for quite awhile and we were fed with pineapple from the farm nearby (see second pic). Finally took some pics together.

Returning to the hotel, we decided to go for our dinner (cum lunch) at a nearby Middle Eastern restaurant (Sultan if I'm not mistaken) and had a good meal.

In the evening, we rested.

Some unfortunate things happened during the second day. My other half lost her phone, believed to have fell into the sea while taking a walk near the beach. Also, my phone seems to be hacked by someone and I could no longer read sms from the phone as this message appears on the phone.

My third son helped fix the problem as he is more IT-savvy.