MI Initiative

Its not Mission Impossible.

The Malaysia-Italy Centre of Excellence for Mathematical Sciences (MICEMS) was established on 10 March 2016 (see this post) and it was officiated by the Deputy Minister of Higher Education in the presence of the Italian Ambassador to Malaysia. At the time, I was carrying out the duties of the Director before Prof. Akma was appointed as the second director. of INSPEM The centre was initiated out of an existing collaboration with Politecnico di Torino (Polito - see also here) with MoU signed much earlier on September 26, 2013. When the idea of the centre was mooted by our Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Industry & Community Relations), I help wrote the proposal paper of MICEMS. To be clear here, at the time I wasn't part of the existing collaboration then but I knew it was a good opportunity and wished that we can make this a reality. Discussed some of the ideas with Prof. Lamberto Rondoni and one of the model we had discussed was of course the well-known International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) in Trieste. Along the way, some of these ideas had changed mainly to accommodate the administrative and financial realities of both universities. Personally, I had told Prof. Rondoni that within my personal capacity, I will try to see things work through for the centre. It is worthwhile to remember some of the hopes of the centre that we had mentioned to the university within five years of the proposal paper for MICEMS:

• To conduct at least three simultaneous research projects shared between our researchers and the researchers of Polito.
• To establish relationships with industries in Turin and other cities of Italy.
• To initiate an international research grant proposal with Polito.
• To plan research programmes and invite renowned international researchers to the centre.

In a way, my future visit to Polito is hoped to address some of these (with my sincere hope that my visit gets endorsed by the Ministry). On my visit's agenda, they are:

• To discuss possible research with Prof. Rondoni (DISMA) and Prof. Bianca Cerchiai (DISAT) respectively on geometric aspects of chaotic systems and quantum information systems.
• To visit Marco Pizzi at Eltek Group, an industry does research on many things including (I was told) semiconductor lasers.
• To visit SmartData@Polito, Data Science and Big Data Research Centre in Polito.

There are many other places I would love to visit of course, like University of Turin and Institute for Scientific Interchange (ISI). But for five-day visit, there is already much to do at Polito itself (including things not listed in the above). The main purpose of the visit is very much to chart MICEMS' future with our Polito partners and hopefully extend the scientific cooperation beyond whatever existing collaboration. In part, just about a week ago, we organized an international seminar on Recent Trends in Mathematical Physics as a MICEMS activity (see pic below) with guest mathematical physicists from within the country and abroad. My personal thought is that it is good to have such an activity introducing MICEMS and that we identified mathematical physics as an area for us to pursue further within the centre, since this is what I personally can do and that it also covers the existing research collaboration in chaotic systems.

I have been telling my colleagues that we should continue supporting MICEMS as an initiative that was given support by governments of both countries. In fact, in my personal view, Malaysia has much more to gain, given that Italy has a longer scientific tradition than us. Italy was right there when Western civilization began its scientific revolution. I think all of us have at least heard the story of Galileo Galilei who helped revolutionize science in the west. Within mathematical sciences, we have from Italy, the following historical figures: Leonardo Fibonacci, Gerolamo Cardano and Giuseppe Luigi Lagrangia. In fact, DISMA has Lagrange's name attached to the department's name. Besides this, it is worthwhile to note that ISI has also launched the Lagrange Project to venture into complex systems and data science. Other notable Italian historical scientific figures are listed here. Today, Italy continues to 'export' its intellectuals worlwide in many different sciences. Apart from a few exceptional cases, our country has yet to come to this level. We will probably need to progress a lot more before attaining such height. In particular, with respect to mathematical sciences, an area often forgotten locally, we have to do much more. Perhaps MICEMS can help do this. For now, I hope to pursue MICEMS at the personal level, irrespective of the outcome of the institute's restructuring. It is sometimes difficult to get researchers to commit to some idea unless it is proven successful and thus the responsibility I personally feel. In any case, I would like to rally colleagues and friends to help support MICEMS initiatives so that we can achieve at least in part what we would like to see happen for mathematical sciences in Malaysia.