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.
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