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 have 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 on 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 her. 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.