Guests at QuEST January Group Meeting

I used to advertise my blog posts at private FB group for my students and staff. I will no longer do this, beginning with this one. The FB social media has become a circus playground of attention-seekers, propaganda and rumour-mongerers. If not for some informative and useful posts (which have become more rare these days), keeping ties with friends and relatives, I would have probably closed my FB account. I have no desire to be a 'public intellectual' (as some would like to be) in the social media and would prefer to avoid any form of herd mentality.

One of my main concern over the years has been building a local scientific tradition particularly for theoretical physics and quantum sciences. Over in Facebook, we have started a private group known as QuEST (acronym for Quantum Explorations of Science and Technology) and we often get requests from people to join this group. So we started another FB group called of Friends of QuEST for the public who is interested in our activities and restrict QuEST for our students and colleagues at UPM. We have been holding regular group meetings on Thursdays (used to have Tuesdays but it became too taxing for us). The meeting takes place just before lunch time simply because of my administrative duties that tend have to have many meetings during normal hours. At each meeting, we will have a presentation by one of the group members. Last Thursday, was a special one because we have a double presentation, one of which is by our visiting researcher Prof. Kurunathan Ratnavelu. We also had Dr. Clarissa Ai Ling Lee joining us for the meeting.

Prof. Kuru joined us last December after his retirement at Universiti Malaya. I first met Prof. Kuru probably in an IFM conference and more closely when I joined the IFM Council. His earlier work is in atomic physics but later moved to other areas including complex networks, an area that I am too exploring (mainly due to related topological and geometrical ideas). He gave a talk on "Guilt by association: A network approach to drug repositioning". I did not know about this application of complex networks before and was intrigued. The talk was based on the paper with his students "Predicting new drug indications from network analysis". Hope we get to explore other applications while he is here in the institute. We are indeed planning a workshop on data science at the institute sometime in March.

Dr. Clarissa, a staff at the Jeffrey Sachs Center on Sustainable Development at Sunway University, was also there that day since we had a meeting earlier to discuss possible projects. One of it is on the history of quantum physics in Malaysia and Singapore, which I thought would be interesting to participate. Another was art interfacing with science and I was told that there are some initiatives on this at the national level. This would be a new exploration for me (if decided to do so) and is unsure where this would lead to. Told her that we participated in Quantum Shorts and we hope to be shortlisted. Well now, I have to update her that we did not get to be shortlisted as mentioned in the previous post.

Due to the presence of our guests, we had extra food that day. Below are some pics (credit to Zahratun and Shela):