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 has 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 o 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 me. 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.

Travelling Day and Day 1 of Krabi Trip

Even before starting this journey to Krabi, I had doubts about my financial ability to support this journey and thus, the reason why I have to keep working despite my retirement. Initially I thought there could be support for my own travel and lodging but alas, I have left UPM and the grant requires UPM affiliation. Despite the shoe-string budget, I thought I should go to show Malaysia presence there (the other Malaysian beside Dr. Yap); later then, I thought, what was I thinking.

The first expense for our trip is to send our six cats to a cat lodging facility, Catzonia in Seremban 2. Another two had to be sent to the vet: Meli that sometimes go into seizure and Koko that has some immunity deficiency.

We took hired cars from our local surau acquaintance to go to the airport. At the airport, I received another surprise that we have to pay for our luggage. So sometimes I wonder how those airlines get to maintain cheap prices. In the past, I was used to the idea of purchasing air ticket automatically includes expenses for the luggage of maximum 20kg each (sometimes even 30kg). Not this time; I had to fork out more than RM600 for our luggage (and to think that I brought along two bundles of exam scripts with me, paying for that as well). From now on, I will be more careful with the cheap air ticket offers and read more on the conditions for whatever purchase. I had momentarily gloom on my face.

So we got on the plane around 5 pm and saw some cheerful faces from the family. It has been awhile since we have travelled together like this and also abroad. The last time we went abroad with the whole family was when we went to Universal Studios, Singapore in 2012. Hope the current trip meant something for the family.

The flight duration is around one and a half hour. On landing, our passage through the immigration was swift. Note that we had initially applied for e-visa but later found out that for a short visit, we could just get a tourist visa. We arrived there around 5.30pm local time. We were greeted by Sitang (a helper for the organizer) who had waited for our arrival and later we took a coach to Aonang Villa Resort.

The coach costs 100 Baht per person and the organizer paid for this. We reached Aonang Villa Resort around 8 in the evening. On the way, we saw an accident involving a lady wearing hijab and her stuff (I presume, she was on a motorbike) was scattered on the road. I hope that she is alright. At the resort, we had to pay extra since the reception insisted that we take an extra bed. We thought that we could just squeeze three in each room and later, we saw a sofa chair that is extendible. In any case, I did not want to argue as need our rest.

After checking in and rested awhile in our rooms, the family went out to nearby stores to look for food, while I stayed in the room to finish up my presentation.

With little sleep, I went to the opening ceremony of the conference.

Listened to the first two talks on neutral atoms (a keynote and member of QTRic). Then I had to excuse myself from the conference (missing Dr. Yap's talk after the coffee break and even lunch) in order to finish my presentation since my laptop cannot run on battery (despite it was the new replaced battery - see this post).

My own talk went slightly over time it seems and there weren't any questions apart from one from the session chairman. I guess, there was little interest in what I had to say and certainly was not in the mainstream theme of the conference. Kwek gave me this photo shot of my talk. 

The next talk was by Jayne Thompson who had his daughter in the audience. The talk seems to be on quantum agents. an idea that I'm not aware of. I believe she is married to Mile Gu, as they were always together. The final two talks were from Thai researchers - there seems to be a lot of interest on quantum machine learning on their side.

The family has started to shop around since our first night here, mainly to look for halal food.

While they were out, I found myself collapsing in bed as I did not have proper sleep for the last few days.