This week, we had EQuaLS2022, which began on Monday, April 11, and ended two days ago (Thursday, April 14). As I have mentioned many times before, this is an event that we look forward to each time it is organized because we are able to listen to researchers who are really at the frontiers of science. To the institute or the university, the presence of these well-known researchers may lent some sense of prestige to the institution. More importantly, as Prof. Kwek once mentioned to me, the event actually allows the international community gets to know the presence of our theoretical community in Malaysia and I would imagine at some point that we can be identified as an actively contributing local community (small as it may be). Bringing us back down to earth, I tend to treat these events more for our learning at a very fast pace.
The event had the following invited speakers:
- Bob Coecke (Quantinuum-Cambridge Quantum)
- Davide Girolami (Politecnico di Torino)
- Arne Grimsmo (The University of Sydney/Amazon Web Services Centre for Quantum Computing)
- Yeong-Cherng Liang (National Cheng Kung University)
- Ahmed Jellal (Chouaib Doukkali University)
- Yuxiang Yang (The University of Hong Kong)
- Rainer Dumke (Center for Quantum Technologies)
- Yutaka Tabuchi (RIKEN Center for Quantum Computing)
Apart from Bob, the other speakers are invited by my younger colleagues and students, in order for them to get speakers of their choice. It is also good that we have our UTM colleague Dr. Yap Yung Szen who invited his experimentalist colleagues from Japan and Singapore. As I have said before, this EQuaLS is the second one not chaired by me. Here are some pics from the event.
The advantage of not being involved in the administrative part of the event allows me to focus more on the lecture materials, and I tend to learn more by listening rather than reading which tends to be slower (maybe due to part of my brain that has adapted to music?). So, this time round, I found myself learning better. For instance, from Rainer Dumke's talk, I get to learn better about transmon qubits. In his talk, there was even a virtual tour to his lab (the first for EQuaLS) 0 see pics below.
When organizing events such as EQuaLS, one of my usual worries of the tendency of our Malaysian audience that tends to be quiet at the Q&A. In the past when we had face-to-face EQuaLS, we enjoyed the exchange of questions and answers among the speakers themselves. With the online platform, the burden of Q&A rests upon the participants themselves, particularly the chairman who should get the ball rolling if everyone turns out to be quiet. This time round, it seems that we have grown to be better. I, myself, asks some questions (misplaced or not). I followed the advice that I gave to my own students. The idea is not to act smart but rather look for places that one wishes to know a little more. There are bound to be some aspects that one does not know or one does not quite understand when it was presented during the talk.
EQuaLS2022 ended on the World Quantum Day and it is precisely for this reason that we have shifted the event to April (in the past, we normally have it at the end of the year or very early in the year). When we first announced the event, we were not really aware (at least I am) that it falls in Ramadhan. Given that the event is a virtual one, there was no real problem with it being in Ramadhan - we do not serve any meals at all for virtual events.
To signify that this day is an important one, we had a public talk just to end the EQuaLS2022. I played a minor role of inviting Bob Coecke to do the public talk since I have invited him to Malaysia a few times (physically). The title of his talk is Quantum AI From High-School Quantum Pictures (see poster below). I have been fascinated by his diagrammatic approach for some time and he is now well-known for this approach (ZX-calculus), but I knew him by name even during the quantum logic days. Another (more subtle) topic that he is well-known for is his idea of compositionality (taking this abstractly separate from the diagrammatic technique); he did not elaborate much on this in the talk, but I did ask something at the end, alluding cryptically to this aspect, for which I wanted to know more of his insights.
I was given the honour to chair his talk and I must say, I was pretty nervous about it. I planned some clever things to say about him and his work like saying something about the language of mind is images (I can't really find a formal reference to this point), but in the end I just read something that the secretariat (which is from Wikipedia). I even forgotten to mention Quantinuum, the name of the company after the merger of Cambridge Quantum Computing with Honeywell, and he is still a Fellow of Wolfson College. In any case, the participants are there not to hear my ceremonial introduction but more for his talk. For those who missed the talk, I have uploaded his talk on my YouTube channel (see below).
This will be my final EQuaLS event while I am still in UPM. I do hope my younger colleagues will continue the tradition still, even after I retire. I am not sure how frequent they will organize the event and whether they will make it coincide with World Quantum Day. Since World Quantum Day is celebrated, it may be competitive to get well-known speakers. Anyway, I leave this to the wisdom to my younger colleagues.
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