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.

Returning to My Roots

The past few weeks, my mind was occupied regarding matters of the institute's restructuring to the point I had little time for other things. This is probably reflected in my last few posts. I have to convey my apologies to my guests who are here for our International Seminar on Recent Trends in Mathematical Physics (coorganized by INSPEM and MICEMS) but I did not quite have the time for them. Also, the next few days, I will be spending time with my family for my first son's convocation.

Our proposal for the restructuring has also taken a different turn. The proposal paper has been written and hopefully submitted for consideration. It took into consideration both the wishes of the researchers on the ground and the university administration. Hopefully it will be well-received for otherwise, we will be criticised by both sides.

Given that the proposal paper is done, my wish is that the matter will not be prolonged any further (noting that there are risks). Much time has been spent on this and it has only caused anxieties. In fact, the whole affair made me wonder whether I should stay on as deputy director. Particularly when my guests were around, I found better excitement when discussing with them, exploring new research ideas. Besides quantization, ideas followed by Syed (my visitor), we also stumbled onto the possibility of using some ideas of quantization that can be used for chaotic systems which is the area of research of our research fellow, Santo. That excitement reminded me of my old days and made me realise something. While matters of the institute is important and to ensure the tradition for mathematical sciences established firmly is what I believe in, perhaps I should be best left to research in mathematical physics and should have not gone into administration. Given my term ends on May 31, if I would be given any choice, I prefer to end my administrative days. I prefer to contribute only as a simple researcher and focus in graduating my students.

In my mind, I had different ideas of a mathematical institute than the one we have; one that explores sophisticated mathematics, very much like the famous institutes abroad. One of the things that we found out while writing up the proposal is the fact all these well-known institutes had relatively few publications (much less than us) but the work they produced are highly cited because the depth of ideas they explore. Also another important character of such institutes is that they are based on very strong visitor programs. Such an institute will probably not survived the number-chasing research environment and an administration that is overly concerned about expenses over long-term benefits. The composition of research areas in such institutes is often not dominated by only applied mathematics but at least a good balance of pure mathematics. This will probably helped us better in international recognition (see mathematics rankings of UM and USM). It is however unfortunate that our local mathematicians tend to shy away from such fields. If ever there is any who started off as pure mathematics, it is almost always, they get pressured by circumstances to change their fields. It is for this reason, I get furious when my junior colleagues (ex-students of mine doing theoretical physics) are asked to change fields to a more 'productive' one. One of our speakers at our recent event, Prof. Teo has assembled a team of mathematical scientists at Xiamen University, which I thought is very interesting. I am pretty sure if they ever wanted to be ranked, they will probably be doing well. Such would be my dream of what the mathematical institute would be. Another aspect would be the interdisciplinary character, which again I stress that this includes cross-overs within the mathematics sub-disciplines. Of course, I can only dream.

Having said I prefer not to continue in the new institute's administration, here are my wishes for the future leadership of the institute. I hope the person will be very open to developments of new mathematical fields and be knowledgeable in the general ideas of such fields. Another wish is for him/her to be more open to international outlook. Particularly whenever international guests are present in the institute, the person can strike interesting intellectual discussion with these guests. Such gestures often give a good impression of the institute, being aware of the development of mathematics as a whole.

So for now, I wish to return to my roots in trying my best to contribute in a challenging area of mathematical science.

The Fight for Mathematical Sciences Part 2

As I watched Avengers' Endgame new trailer today and the suspense it builds around it, I can't help thinking that I'm experiencing the suspense build around another endgame for the institute itself. Two days ago, when I chaired the institute meeting, there were voices of dissatisfaction, voices of the wants of mathematical community, some of which sounded patronising. Then I had the spur of realisation that this will not gel well with the university. The university management too has their wants that ought to be considered by all, to which I remarked in the meeting, if we can't frame our wants in the context of what benefits the university, we will forever be battling.

In the meeting, I had prepared a presentation to assess the progress that we had made as a community of mathematical scientists in UPM, particularly with reference to INSPEM. I was trying to move away from the position of only responding to the pressure of external factors of restructuring and high KPIs, which are not in our control, to a position of where we as a community of mathematical scientists would want to go amidst constraints. I had spent long hours on the presentation, thinking of what to say. But when it was presented, I didn't get to say as much as I wanted to say. So perhaps this post is to make up what I have missed.

I began with our recent QS subject rankings. Now I know there is this love-hate relationship between academics and rankings and some even spoke of ignoring rankings altogether. I do not subscribe to this view. Some go on to mock by taking a single datum, make singular comparison and confusing different datasets (between individual and organizational achievements) altogether. I prefer to approach the matter as a scientist by viewing the rankings are simply datasets and there is valuable information that comes with them. A single datum does not mean much but better information can be gotten when this is seen in a bigger context within one dataset or even correlating them with another dataset. I do agree however, rankings are open to abuse (as much as anything else) and administrators begin to become obsessive about them. But we should separate this form of poor judgement from seeking valuable information from the rankings (and yes, it takes effort to uncover useful information).

I have mentioned in the last post that UPM was ranked 201-250 for the subject of mathematics in 2019 along with UKM and UTM. I am pretty sure some of those who attended the meeting do not know about this. But what perhaps even more not known that we were also ranked 201-250 in the year before (at least I do not know it myself until I start to check this recently).

Perhaps what I wanted to point out is that we did not quite care about this before because of the different context we are experiencing and because of our own apathy. We are made aware of the ranking this year because of two things: the imminent threat of restructuring and the fact that there was a social media announcement that took the length of even reporting the top 300 and top 400 subjects being ranked in the university but mathematics was not mentioned. In other words, if we do not look for this piece of information, we will remain oblivious about the matter. Now our own 201-250 ranking information does not mean much but the fact that we are in the same bracket as UKM and UTM while UM and USM ranked above us, does mean something. It will be more meaningful if we look deeper into the ranking scores.

What we could see that our ranking relied mostly through our academic reputation, which we have build over the years. The things we need to further improve on are our citations per paper and the h-index scores. When I say improve, I don't mean manipulatively but more from the intrinsic value of each of our publication. As I said, one can make use of this ranking information to help us progress better in mathematics rather than being apathetic or even emotional about it. I also took the trouble of looking at the ranking of materials science in UPM (251-300) due to many of our university researchers are in this area. The scores reveal the opposite from that of mathematics; here the researchers need to work on the academic reputation as the citations per paper score is the highest among the Malaysian universities.

QS subject ranking relied more on citations. With growing concern of our increased KPI, the publication volume dataset will be another relevant source of information that we can look to. Note however, that larger number of scientific publications does not necessarily entail better scientific progress but may only increase its probability of being so. Let me show the UPM total math publication again from the last post.

One can see clearly the steep increase of mathematics publications is after the declaration of research university status. It must be noted however, that not all of these publications come from mathematics department or the institute. Other entities also contribute to this volume of publications. The breakdown can be seen from the following piechart.

It can be seen that computer science and engineering contributed substantially to the total mathematics publications. This is followed by materials science and physics. This might seems to be a negative point to mathematicians but one should make use of this knowledge positively. We can use this to plan for a better future version of the institute and hence meet the interdisciplinary need of the institute.

It should be interesting also to compare the mathematics publication output of the other research universities with that of UPM. To do this, we limit the period of publications to only the last five years (2014-2018), so that each dataset is comparable to the other. This is shown below.

Apart from UKM, all the research universities (including UPM) follow the same trend and hence can be attributed to some conditions happening at the national level. This is particular the case for the dip in mathematics publications for last year (2018) and hence UPM's decrease in mathematics 2018 publications must not be seen in isolation. The UKM case seems to be anomalous but the dip in 2016 seems to be present also in UM, USM and UTM.

Let us go back to the mathematics publications of UPM. Do INSPEM contributions follow the same trend as UPM? Below we show the mathematics publications for the period of 2003-2019 (to coincide with INSPEMs) followed by INSPEM's own mathematics publications. (Please ignore the last data point since this only represents the publication volume for the first three months of 2019.)

INSPEM publications (the second one) do not follow closely the curve for UPM (the top one) but there is a similarity in trend. The dip in 2014 for UPM is shown in INSPEM as a decreasing trend and this decreasing trend on average continues. One can also see that the decrease in publications in 2018 is seen in both UPM and INSPEM. Hence decrease in 2018 INSPEM publications can be attributed to something that happens at the university level or even at the national level (referring to the earlier diagrams for all RUs). Let us do a more quantitative comparison by listing the fraction of UPM mathematics publications that come from INSPEM (see below).

Note that from 2010-2014, INSPEM' s contribution is always above 50% (apart from 2011). From 2015 onwards, it fell below 50% which is worrying. The year 2015 was the year before our second director took over from the first and I can only remember this was the period when we had much reduced budget and even lost some contract staff. Nevertheless, such decreasing trend should send us warning signals that we need to rectify the situation. Perhaps the university's insistence for higher KPIs will help, though my personal humble opinion that this should be done with care. As I have once said that the usual response to a threat is fight or flight. It would be much better that if the administrators can convince all researchers of the need to address the problem and by them owning up this problem, there will be a better working and research environment and hence help the university reach its desired targets. Again numbers are just numbers and they are only meaningful if there is indeed a genuine scientific progress made in the research ecosystem.

I ended the presentation with the same subject bubble plot that I have shown in my last post. The basic idea is to further refine the Malaysian mathematics publication analysis right down to the subfields within mathematics. The plot consists of a vertical axis of cites per document which shows the intrinsic (average) citation that a subfield has, while the horizontal axis is its (extrinsic) h-index whose value are determined by citations across a history of documents. Bubbles of each subfield are plotted in this parameter space with the size of the bubble is determined by the number of publications in the subfield for the considered period. In a way, these gives us an idea of how each subfield is trending in Malaysia. I gave both plots of the 2013-2014 period (five years ago) and the 2017-2018 period (last year). This is shown respectively below as the first one and the second one.

As clearly shown above, mathematics research is very dynamical. Let me take the example of mathematical physics, the field that I am in. In 2013-2014 diagram (the first one), it is represented by the bubble next to analysis. It has about 6 cites per document and the h-index of about 22 (taken from 33 documents). In 2017-2018, the cites per document is reduced to about 0.9 but h-index remains about 22 for mathematical physics. As stated earlier, the absolute values themselves may not mean much but the relative position in the parameter space reveals perhaps much more meaning. For mathematical physics, the intrinsic cites per document became the highest in mathematics but its h-index remains modest relative to other fields. The subject with the highest h-index is Modeling and Simulation (the bubble besides Applied Mathematics) with the value of 55. Its cites per document (about 0.4) is relatively high than most other subjects but is still much lower than Mathematical Physics.

Perhaps another important point that can be drawn by the diagram is that even the subfields of mathematics shows variations of citation culture, even within mathematics itself. It will probably be of no surprise if one is to plot the bubble diagram for the whole of science, one can see much more variation in the citation culture. I did not show such diagram in my presentation but below I give it for Malaysian publications in the period of 2017-2018.

One can see that mathematics citation culture is among the lowest of all the sciences. The other lower subjects (the bubbles to the left under mathematics) are Economics, Econometrics & Finance and Arts & Humanities. It is perhaps no wonder that researchers among the social sciences often felt underappreciated when they are being compared to the other sciences. But such feeling can be extended to the subject of mathematics itself. It is best that university administrators understand this cultural difference in citations among the different sciences or even more generally the cultural difference in research among the different sciences.

On the next day after the institute meeting, I met the former director who actually founded INSPEM to relay to him about our current worries. I can see his disappointment about the imminent changes to the institute. He mentioned his wishes that we (me and the management) will be able to carry INSPEM through in the future. I left his room with the feeling of a heavy burden on my shoulders. After coming back home from work, I had another spike in my blood pressure and hence rested thereafter. My nap was shortened as my mind went through many scenarios and having thoughts of this particular post. So how should we do the plot of the endgame?

The Fight for Mathematical Sciences

These days of information glut, one needs a conscientiouss effort to thrust forward valuable information for our use. Otherwise valuable gems of information may simply get squashed by the volume of other information. Recently QS came out with their 2019 subject rankings and our university quickly highlighted those subjects that were ranked in the social media (see picture below).

Not seeing Mathematics in the picture, my gut feeling told me that it must have got ranked given the progress we have made so far. So I checked the QS Rankings for the subject of mathematics and yes, we were ranked at 201-250 (see below).

I informed my management colleagues and they felt that it should be highlighted by the university as well in the social media. Hence I mentioned it in one of the private university forums and they said that they will change this (so far I have not seen it). I do not think the absence of mathematics was purposely done but more probably is that less interest is taken in mathematics (which is a shame). I have no intent to make this as a big issue but such lack of interest in the progress made by our mathematical scientists can be misused by others, giving the impression that we have not progressed as much as in other sciences. On the other hand, while being ranked as such, we know ourselves that we still need better progress to move forward.

As part of the reason on why I would be surprised that we would be unranked is that there have been other studies showing that our country is progressing well in mathematics research. For instance, the paper "Mathematics Research in Association of Southeast Asian Nations Countries: A Scientometric Analysis of Patterns and Impacts" shows Malaysia is one of the four countries (the rest are Singapore, Vietnam and Thailand) that contribute most in the mathematics publications (95%) in ASEAN. In a way I was slightly surprised that we are comparable to Vietnam since Vietnam has a longer mathematical tradition associated to both French and Russian traditions (see particularly the math highly cited publications in the table below.

Some of these, as expected, are having international collaborators, which according to the paper makes our papers to be better cited. Malaysia, so it seems, are mainly having collaborators from Iran, India and Saudi Arabia (I was surprised by the third) - see the graph plot below. Uzbekistan, whose mathematical community in Malaysia is significant, seems to come fifth after USA. To digress, it was through Uzbek mathematician, Abdumalik Rakhimov (once our research fellow in the institute), that I got my Erdos number 4 (which of course does not say anything significant) - see below. Another observation is the graph density (not calculated in the paper); ours are as dense as Vietnam's but not as dense as Singapore's, showing better international diversity.

Now the question is how much of this is contribution from our university, UPM. First note that the dataset used in the above is from the period of 2006-2015. While I can't find (at the time of this writing) how mathematics contribution are distributed among say, the research universities, the distribution among broad science categories can be found here. Let us just focus on mathematics in UPM where I have done some information filtration through Scopus before this. Here is the mathematics publications affiliated with UPM from 1980-2019 (see below).

Prior to 1992, there seems to be negligible Scopus-cited mathematics publication from UPM. An appreciable increase in publications can be seen from 2000 onwards. A steep rise can be seen after 2006. It is plausible to make connections with some known events. Some notable events are (i) the formation of the institute INSPEM in April 2002; and (ii) the status of UPM as research university in October 2006. Of course, there is a multitude of factors that can be considered. We will next consider only those publications affiliated with INSPEM.

It is interesting to note that the first publication begins in 2003. It is very much plausible that there may be researchers of the institute that have published before this but without INSPEM affiliation since the institute is a new phenomenon. One can also note that from the side numbers, the number of publications for each year is lower than that for the whole of UPM. Until 2016, the percentage of INSPEM publication relative to UPM total math publication hovers between 42-60%. It is to be noted that researchers have the freedom to put down the INSPEM affiliation or not (even if the research grant is parked at the institute) in their papers. There is also the policy that the publications from the institute will still be counted at the various faculties. While this can be said as a disadvantage, the institute has always given the freedom to the researchers though we recommended to them to include the institute affiliation in their publications. The percentage of INSPEM publications dropped to around 30% beginning 2017. We are not quite sure why this is so but I have argued before that certainly this coincides with the period of reduced fundings and shrinkage of the number of staff.

Having observed the above, it is only natural for the institute to study whatever weaknesses and threats there are to the institute. This is the more reason why we at the institute should consolidate our strength and resources to ensure the survival of the institute. We have already heard the news of possible restructuring of the institute, which undoubtedly has brought the morale down and makes it even more difficult for us to progress. Recent setting of the KPIs has also worsened the situation for the institute mainly because the KPI setting is done without differentiating the research culture of each discipline. It is widely known that mathematics has modest publication rates, which is at best is two or lower per year - see the issued statement of American Mathematical Society over here. Another study of American mathematicians in fact revealed that it is even lower than one per year (see figure below).

Similarly for citations, the citation culture is different in mathematics, often lower than other sciences (and hence also for other indicators that depend on citations like h-index) - see the following study by International Mathematical Union and the following discussion (pg 32-34) in European Mathematical Society Newsletter. It would be terribly unjust to ignore these differences. It will be no surprise then by setting the KPI of publication rate at five papers per year (as main author), for instance, scares everyone away from being a member of the institute. Had it been KPIs being merely targets and unrelated to salary movement or promotion assessments, it would have been more acceptable. Unfortunately, this is usually not the case and most people see KPIs in the context of threats. The usual response would be fight or flight.

Setting a blanket KPI would be an easy route for university administrators to monitor progress, but one that will come at a price. Unrealistic KPIs would invite unethical approaches by researchers that often may embarrass the universities themselves (see Retraction Watch posts on Malaysia). At best, researchers will show indifference towards to the vision and goals of the university. Some may ask why should the university allow different treatments for a particular discipline. Why should we be considered 'special', as someone asked. Then one can respond back with the same reasoning of why should any ranking agencies be interested in ranking of universities by subjects. It is just a simple acknowledgement of the fact that there are research cultural differences one can't just ignore. I understand the fact the university wishes to progress and not be contented with present achievements. I believe everyone in their right mind, wants to be so. That is why I suggest that any progress be done realistically and incrementally based on past achievements and present resources. We could look to the subject ranking for mathematics as a guide. For instance, for the publication KPI that one needs to set is perhaps the average number of publications of a mathematician from the bracket of top 151-200 universities, since we have already being ranked at top 201-250. Now the criteria for the QS ranking was based mainly on citations and overall reputation and not publication rate, but with some efforts, we can get the average number of publications from Scopus dataset. Below are some breakdowns of the ranking indicators used.

The first column is the overall reputation, the second is citations per paper and the third is h-index citations. We can immediately see that we really need to work on the citations (and I don't mean manipulatively). One should now work on publishing our research materials in journals where the relevant community flocks to (and this does not necessarily means Q1 and Q2 journals as some would like to think). Each journal tends to have a particular following and we can look for those respectable ones where our research output would be most read by, particularly those which are more specialised. There are other 'strategies' that one could also use; for instance uploading preprints to some repository like the arXiv, making our work more visible (and hence also open to more critics). We can even go to more details; within the mathematics subfields, which are the ones more identifiable with our institute, build reputation around it. Here is a snapshot of the mathematical subfields found visible for Malaysia in 2017-2018 given by Scimago.

Let me just end this post with a saying that I have read elsewhere: as the university gets more critical with our achievements, one should also be equally critical with the critieria that we have been measured against. One can be easily deluded by 'numbers' that appears objective, but it is what do these numbers actually mean, which is the subjective part. Instead of being preoccupied with such numbers, we should be more concerned with the science that we grow. Deep within us, we know ourselves whether we are doing alright or not.

Seed Bed

(Another post that I had to share due to its importance)

This post is about seminars particularly the institute's weekly seminar. No, it's not about controversies raised around this matter but more on how to resurrect the spirit of scholarly activity and discussions in seminars. Regarding whatever controversy there is (if there is one), my wish is that everyone place some appropriate concern about the institute, beyond own self or own group, solving the (many) problems of the institute. I'm not too much bothered who is more right or who is more wrong but I will be more glad to see someone offering solutions in action (not simply in thoughts).

The institute has religiously conducted its weekly seminars since the early days until now. This is a good tradition to keep. I remember during my PhD days we had this weekly Friday seminars, where members of the Centre for Particle Theory from both Department of Physics and Department of Mathematical Sciences, went to these talks religiously. Besides this, we had also an internal Journal Club lunchtime talks given by both staff and students. In DAMTP, Cambridge, I remember they had several group seminars almost all days in the week and I went to some of them when the topic is highly interesting to me and the seminar rooms were always filled by interested staff and students. I also had the experience of going to String Theory Workshop(s) in DAMTP and LMS Durham Symposia where the lecture halls were filled to the brim. I had the fond memory of attending Spinors, Twistors and Complex Structures in General Relativty in 1988 (chaired by Roger Penrose and Chris Isham) and went to almost all of the talks. Remembered the incident of Claude LeBrun's talk having used index free notation and the audience wanted them with indices. He proceeded with even more notations without indices. Later when Trautman gave his talk, he joked that the audience will now see some index and he was talking about index theorems. The other symposium that I went was on Geometry of Low-Dimensional Manifolds in 1989 and Ed Witten was one of the speakers. In all of these events, the atmosphere was electrifying and the corridor and coffee conversations were about the progress in science. That is why when I go to many of the local events here, it is frustrating and embarrassing to see such an atmosphere is really rare. Our conversations tend to revolve around gossips, politics, holiday-plans and of course, food instead. When we go to parallel sessions of a conference, sometimes the audience is simply the speakers of the session themselves. Once in an international conference held locally, the audience that were left are the international speakers and participants and I heard one of them made the remark, where are all the local people. Once also in the social media, I read a remark of a participant in one of the (local) international conferences made derogatory remarks about the scientific intent of the event. This has to be taken seriously by us local academics - don't let it get any worse.

Going back to our weekly seminars, we noticed the reduced number of participants and the lack of interactions over the years. While I do not think going to all seminars being practical, I have always thought that whenever the topic is on a particular area, the appropriate research group should be there but this is often not the case. We tried different things to have better response for the seminars. We have now announcements on the social media (used to be on twitter too but I guess many of us do not do twitter). The past director had also made the change that the speakers should be from outside or among the academic staff to ensure better attraction and hopefully participation. This is because at one stage, we had too frequently student speakers for the seminars. In principle, there is nothing wrong with this, provided the student is well-prepared for the talk and willing to take up questions professionally. During my student days, we had our own separate student events separate from the official and regular ones. Presently our theoretical physics group is doing just that for the QuEST group meetings (QuEST stands for Quantum Explorations of Science & Technology). Thankfully, this is going well each week (apart from some festive season and conference periods). So the question is why can't we have the weekly seminars highly-spirited like we ought to. When I chaired the talk yesterday and I was about to start the Q&A session, the speaker even made the remark that maybe the audience was too tired for this (?). Perhaps we have hit rock bottom?

When I wanted to write up this post, I tried to search for some history of the seminar tradition. I came across two interesting ones: (i) The academic seminar as emotional community; and (ii) Creative discomfort: The culture of the Gelfand seminar at Moscow University. Let's leave the second one for some remarks at the end and focus on the first. In the first article, it tells us that the word seminar (coming from Latin seminarium) refers to nursery or seed bed. I thought this is fitting since it is from seminars and ensuing discussions, that we often get research ideas. However it was the title emotional community that really caught my attention, particularly the word emotional itself. We all know when we organise seminars, workshops and conference, they are meant to serve some particular community. But having emotional attachments? Perhaps, as discussed in the first paper, it's a spiritual fellowship or brotherhood of equals joining forces in the pursuit of truth, with the seminar (participants as fellows) as a manifestation. I quote in full, the ending sentence of the paper:

"A good seminar, based in a community of shared emotions - and in which the individual can both become part of the collective and at the same time find his or her own unique way to creative self-realisation - is still a guiding academic utopia"

Our weekly seminar should have, over the years, made some form of impact, at least, to the research ecosystem that we have built. If we have not felt it, then there must be some elements that made it ineffective. Perhaps we have not shown the seminar tradition the respect it deserves. If we did not, then it is highly unlikely that anyone else (beyond the fellowship) will. I have already heard someone mention the scepticism in passing that we have been organising the seminars for the ump-teenth time but yet the impact is unknown. On the other hand, I have also heard others being envious of our consistency in organising the weekly seminars when they still find it problematic to get people to give talks regularly. So we have to keep examining ourselves to ensure the spirit of our seminars is not lost. If we feel that our seminars are not worth going, others will probably feel the same way even more. The seminar should bind us together (and not make us fall apart).

In some places, the seminars that the institution conduct, tend to give the unique characteristic or identity that the institution (or generally the fellowship) has. I have already mention a few examples during my student years. In the past, I have always looked at the online talks of KITP, Perimeter Institute and MSRI, knowing how informative they are. Not only they organise seminars regularly but they also put them online for the whole world to see. Perhaps in the (far) future, when we do not have to deal with petty matters, we can do this also (we did try this at some point, with videos, uploaded in our YouTube channel instead of hosting it ourselves - see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4HTVaRqPFA for instance, with the expertise help of Majalah Sains then - apologies for the absence of credit in the video clip).

One exceptional series of seminars that had caught the attention of many in the mathematical world is of course the legendary Gelfand Seminars led by I.M. Gelfand at Moscow State University, which one can read in the second article above. The seminar is held on Monday nights and can last to four hours straight with intimidating questioning. It is not the kind of seminar that may suit many. However, the impact that it made, are felt by mathematicians across the world. One can read the tributes to Gelfand in https://www.ams.org/notices/201301/rnoti-p24.pdf and https://www.ams.org/notices/201302/rnoti-p162.pdf. While we read in awe such exceptional cases, we should put in energy to make our weekly seminar series be impactful to us and respectable to many, the very least. We may or may not see this realised within our lifetime (particularly with the uncertainties ahead - yes, despite what we have heard earlier in Monday afternoon) but at least the future generations will not curse us for not trying.

Not Quite Equal As Yet

*Due to the importance of the issues discussed here, I will advertise again this particular post in the students and staff FB private groups.

Thank goodness, this week went by without 'unwanted incidents'. Sometimes one gets so tied up with petty matters that we forget the larger perspective of things. I join the institute (initially IMM, then ITMA and finally INSPEM) because of this larger perspective. My general vision is to establish tradition in sophisticated, technical theoretical sciences and in particular theoretical physics.

Parts of what I do are also related to some modern developments of mathematics (mainly geometry side) and thus when I joined INSPEM with better mathematical environment, I was hoping some of these get further developed with mathematicians. There was no geometrists around (the closest being algebraists) but the director then had a research group interested in number theory (and on the application side is cryptography). So when I did the first lecture series in INSPEM, EQuaLS1, it had a theme "Geometry, Number Theory and Quantum Physics". The people I brought over were top-notch scientists and my hope that it will spur interests among mathematicians and physicists that will help cross traditional disciplines. This did not quite happen; I guess being identified too much as a quantum theorist may have caused very few mathematicians were interested in the event. The same is true for the next EQuaLS2 (despite the theme is "Foundations of Quantum Science & Technology"), which I hope will attract theoretical computer scientists working on logic and category theory. The next few EQuaLS became closer and closer to physics after realizing that it is hard to garner interests from the mathematicians. The last EQuaLS was EQuaLS8 which ended with the tragic departure of mentor-friend Prof. Syed Twareque Ali. We had not done another EQuaLS since then.

Without our mentor, our international networking of established researchers shrunk. That was not the only reason; the financial support for inviting established researchers was also declining. Initially there was capacity building grant from Ministry of Science - this no longer exists. The latter events also use in part the visiting scientist programme under the institute funded by mostly our research grants. Recently, this too became difficult as additional requirements are imposed for visiting scientists namely to coauthor publications with our local researchers. This is a bit awkward - most of the scientists I invited are top-notch scientists from whom we simply wanted to learn from. To coauthor publications require long-established relationships and our local researchers are able to generate ideas/work of mutual interest for the established researchers. Thus, with such conditions, the network of international researchers became even smaller. Not having research grants the last two years made it even worse.

So what should we do now? My personal wish is that we continue with EQuaLS at a smaller scale so that the tradition at least continues with a lesser stature. I have only a few years of services left to see this happening. We do now have a small group in existent and I hope they will continue the efforts to establish sophisticated and respected theoretical research here and hopefully crossing physics-mathematics boundary. Hope my younger colleagues will continue this vision with the same sense of urgency (whether in the current institute or possible forthcoming one).

With near retirement, the usual advice one gets is to help the younger scientists to excel. This can only be done if the younger generation of scientists and students are receptive. In this respect, I still have reservations on the matter. This semester I'm supposed to teach Special Relativity and Classical Fields. The initial already small number of registered students dwindled down to the number shown in the pic below. I guess many still avoid theoretical subjects that are often perceived as difficult. Luckily the department still supports the course to continue. Last semester, I was supposed to teach Advanced Quantum Mechanics but had to cancel it as almost everyone dropped the subject. I ended up teaching another subject beginning the third week. There is truth about theoretical subjects being more difficult but I sincerely wish that the students view this more as a challenge in taking up more sophisticated materials, more in-depth skills for them to bring away from their studies.

Another matter recently brought up was the attendance to the institute's weekly seminar. The number has decreased over the years and one finds that the audience comprises more of international students than local students. While I do not expect all students to attend each seminar (which may not be on the topic of their choice) but I do expect that students of the appropriate research group to come to the seminar of the relevant topic. Has it come to the point that one perceives one's own work (whatever that may be - more often just personal work) being more important than supporting an academic tradition. What had happened to thirst of knowledge? One has to rectify this and the best way is ourselves (both staff and academics) to be exemplary in this case. I had once suggested that one should avoid having meetings on Friday afternoons (the regular time for our weekly seminars). I will also start asking my own students to avoid making appointments at this time. Take even odd hours (like lunch time - normally I stay in office) if necessary. Hopefully by doing this way, others will start to treat our weekly seminars with more respect.

Three Short Tales

It is properly clear to the staff that I practiced very open participatory management and am open to ideas and even criticisms (not toxic ones of course). As a scientist, the possibility of being at fault is very much entertained though this should not be construed as self-admission of guilt or weakness. One employs self-criticisms to help improve oneself. Having said so, one would like to see others do the same. In this post, I would like to tell three stories of recent events that made me self-reflect. I will not mention names but only retelling them for us to learn.

Story 1: Recently one hears about Cambridge International University from a politician. Don't bother looking up this university as the website has been hacked. I have no wish to comment further on the viralled news of the politician (one can look up many news items on this). But it made me remember an incident I had with an ex-Adelaidean friend. When we corresponded then, I told my friend that I am studying Part III in University of Cambridge. The person then responded, asking 'Which Cambridge am I in?' perhaps doubting my capability to be even a Cambridge student. I did not respond back and kept quiet (for those doubting, please look at this post). To me, it is not that important that I had been a Cambridge student, but more importantly is how one acts thereafter. Sometimes one finds people boasting about their prestigious university background but does not quite live up to its prestigious names. This leads me to a recent discussion about what are the traits of our university students; their employability and what-nots. The natural discussion thereafter was the traits of our university professors. While the discussion was on a particular skill, I am actually more concerned with the technical knowledge that a professor should have - particularly when interacting with professors in other parts of the world within the same area. Failure to be seen to profess the technical knowledge may tarnish the university's professorial image. One should live up to the expectations of the title of professor, much like one has to live up the expectations of being a Cambridge student (when one claimed so). Indeed, it is a heavy responsibility to have the professor title, something I always remind myself.

Story 2: This is an independent story and not to be misconstrued with the story above. Recently I was under fire by a professor for failing to defend the institute during the restructuring plans and later to defend the unique fields of study that we offered. One day, the professor met with the institute's administrative officer (and also others but not me) and complained about the institute's restructuring that we are asked to do. The officer tried to explain that the decision was the university's wish but the professor still has the opinion that we have not really done our best to defend the institute, The professor goes on to threaten that research grants under the professor's name at the institute will be pulled out. In the first place, the grant is public money (not personal money) entrusted to the professor for carrying out research at the institute but I leave this to the wisdom of our Research Management Centre if the person decides to do so. We then had a long break for the Chinese New Year and I thought everyone has cooled down and that we can resume our usual duties without too much headache. Unfortunately, the professor came again to complain about the same thing to another officer with more stories to tell. I see this as a personal attack on me and the actions seem to be like a smear campaign. The professor threatened again to pull out the grants and now also mentioned withdrawing the students as well. For me using threats is simply unprofessional and mafia-like. My immediate feelings is that I wish not to work with such a person and it will take considerable time, if ever, for me to trust this professor again. Let me add that this is not the first incident that I had problems with this professor on made-up accusations.

Story 3: Students can sometimes have very strong opinions about the academics they see or work with. They may have high opinions of themselves and at times get hypercritical of others (which I would usually cautioned them to be more self-critical with themselves first before others). The incident here is I was asked to sign a recommendation letter by a student whom I co-supervised (I was also acting as the institute coordinator for graduate studies). Frankly I do not see the idea of supervisory committee works well for mathematical or theoretical areas but this would be a different issue. I was of the opinion that I shouldn't be signing the letter since it is inappropriate. Then word gets to me that she (the student) thought (or someone else, I do not know) that I refused signing the letter because I was not listed as co-author for her proceeding papers. To me, this is an insulting accusation. At no times, I forced anyone to put me as a coauthor on their papers. Even research work with my own students, I have at many times told students that if they feel I have not contributed to the research, they can leave my name out. If in doubt, they can always refer to the Vancouver protocols. Finally, the graduate school asked me to sign her appeal letter instead of a recommendation letter.

Guests at QuEST January Group Meeting

I used to advertise my blog posts at private FB group for my students and staff. I will no longer do this, beginning with this one. The FB social media has become a circus playground of attention-seekers, propaganda and rumour-mongerers. If not for some informative and useful posts (which have become more rare these days), keeping ties with friends and relatives, I would have probably closed my FB account. I have no desire to be a 'public intellectual' (as some would like to be) in the social media and would prefer to avoid any form of herd mentality.

One of my main concern over the years has been building a local scientific tradition particularly for theoretical physics and quantum sciences. Over in Facebook, we have started a private group known as QuEST (acronym for Quantum Explorations of Science and Technology) and we often get requests from people to join this group. So we started another FB group called of Friends of QuEST for the public who is interested in our activities and restrict QuEST for our students and colleagues at UPM. We have been holding regular group meetings on Thursdays (used to have Tuesdays but it became too taxing for us). The meeting takes place just before lunch time simply because of my administrative duties that tend have to have many meetings during normal hours. At each meeting, we will have a presentation by one of the group members. Last Thursday, was a special one because we have a double presentation, one of which is by our visiting researcher Prof. Kurunathan Ratnavelu. We also had Dr. Clarissa Ai Ling Lee joining us for the meeting.

Prof. Kuru joined us last December after his retirement at Universiti Malaya. I first met Prof. Kuru probably in an IFM conference and more closely when I joined the IFM Council. His earlier work is in atomic physics but later moved to other areas including complex networks, an area that I am too exploring (mainly due to related topological and geometrical ideas). He gave a talk on "Guilt by association: A network approach to drug repositioning". I did not know about this application of complex networks before and was intrigued. The talk was based on the paper with his students "Predicting new drug indications from network analysis". Hope we get to explore other applications while he is here in the institute. We are indeed planning a workshop on data science at the institute sometime in March.

Dr. Clarissa, a staff at the Jeffrey Sachs Center on Sustainable Development at Sunway University, was also there that day since we had a meeting earlier to discuss possible projects. One of it is on the history of quantum physics in Malaysia and Singapore, which I thought would be interesting to participate. Another was art interfacing with science and I was told that there are some initiatives on this at the national level. This would be a new exploration for me (if decided to do so) and is unsure where this would lead to. Told her that we participated in Quantum Shorts and we hope to be shortlisted. Well now, I have to update her that we did not get to be shortlisted as mentioned in the previous post.

Due to the presence of our guests, we had extra food that day. Below are some pics (credit to Zahratun and Shela):

Quantum Short-Lived Attempt

After a few gloomy posts, I thought I would be able to share a good news today. Not so, unfortunately, given the results of Quantum Shorts out today. Our short film was not shortlisted (we know that it was a long-shot).

On November 16,2018, I wrote in our private FB group page, whether we should try out for Quantum Shorts. It is a sort of out-of -the-blue kind of suggestion, thinking of a group activity which is out of our normal routine. We had only a few weeks to think about it since the closing date is December 1, 2018. After some discussions, the group OK-ed it and thought of some plots to do. My student's version of how it went can be found here. I remembered at the same time I was listening to James Arthur- Anne Marie "Rewrite the Stars" (see below)



So the idea is partly inspired by the lyrics, "It Feels Impossible, It's Not Impossible, Is It Impossible, Say That It's Possible" - something that connects with the ideas of what questions are to be asked (measured) and the post-measurement states. Several themes crossed my mind: contextuality, free will theorem and Wigner's friend. The other source of inspiration was the film "Inception" which involves several levels of dreams (realities). We thought that we could apply the plot twist in the film to the one that we want to produce. Had asked my student to volunteer write a script based on some of the ideas thrown. Finally, we settled down to simply use one concept namely Wigner's Friend so that the film is simpler in ideas (easily recognisable). There are different plots being written and they evolved to the one being filmed. Much thanks to the group who was sporting enough to realise this. The final product "Rewriting Wigner's Friend" can be found below (in lower resolution for YouTube posting).



The Frauchiger-Renner paper mentioned in the film is a real paper and can be found here. The film actually has three levels of 'realities'. The first when they are acting with the coin flip (stopped abruptly before the coin flip result). The second is when they were supposedly finished acting and were discussing whether the shooting is OK. Finally, the third is the level of the viewer when the question of the scripwriter is answered. Had wanted it a bit more twisted and surprising but since this is our first attempt, we left it as that.

It is a pity that our film was not shortlisted for otherwise, we may get to be known by others. Particularly I was hoping that our 'creative work' gets to be noticed by the university. However with 176 entries from 40 countries, we knew it was a long shot (but nevertheless was still hoping). It's time to move on now.

Finally for Chinese readers of the blog, I wish you a Happy Chinese New Year.

Lend Me An Ear

This week is probably the most trying week for me. Had I not changed the blood pressure medication earlier this year, my blood pressure would probably have reached a new high.

First, there was this emotional outburst complaint made against the proposed restructuring of the institute (which did not originate from us). Second, the need to resolve an issue that was left open, coupled to the criticism that probably has led to the restructuring. Both of these seems to rekindle the faculty-institute friction despite years of coexistence and probably have upset my superiors. My emotions went to a new low and I entertained the idea of early retirement. I can't stomach all the office politics. The fact that I don't rub shoulders with top people and am controversy-shy, probably puts me in a terrible disadvantage. It was also made known to me much earlier that some think that the institute will grow unstable under my watch. I almost succumbed to make this as a self-realising prophesy.

However knowing I have supportive management colleagues and finally getting our views heard by someone, have helped comfort me a little. I still fear of what will happen next. But I guess I have to take this one step at a time. Sometimes I simply wish that we be left alone to do our usual work.

Moving On

At present, we have settled with one proposal of restructuring of the institutes and hope that we will no longer need to look again too much on the matter. We need to move beyond these uncertainties and do the real work on the ground, the research activities. Our past experience has told us that one can have the most beautiful thing on paper but pragmatically on the ground, all these plans have to be worked out and these are usually much harder. So it is a relief (again) to have this proposal out. To my own staff, they probably know me that I love to do scientific work more than all these managerial and administrative tasks. On the other hand, I do feel compelled to be part of decision-making process to ensure that our past efforts on building our research ecosystems will not go to waste and that whatever changes there will be, these should make us progress better and not the reverse. In a way, all these years in the management make me realise that complaining is easy but to help find (optimal) solutions is the one that is hard and the one that matters.

For now an immediate matter that should be of concern is the new call for proposals for FRGS, TRGS and LRGS research grants by the ministry. I hope our institute members will start writing proposals. I wish to write one too but past experiences have made me to be more cautious about doing one. Certainly some rules of the game have changed and there are now more demands tied up with one's research grant. Having only about four years of service left has also made me to be more careful on what research to be considered for the proposal. Given that I have started several different directions, all of which have open problems that I wish to tackle, I am still uncertain on what to do. Whatever it is, I hope it will be something really good that I can end my university career on. Perhaps even a ground breaking one (I can dream, can I?)

I also entertained an idea of applying for LRGS or TRGS (L stands for long term and T stands for transdisciplinary). The former will need a few other institutions outside one's own, while the latter involves several faculties or institutes within one's institution). Have tried one before but it was shot down at the ministerial committee for being too ambitious (had this comment quite a few times for my other proposals). Well, perhaps now one can entertain it to be one which is less technical. Partly because the themes to be considered are now leaning more towards social issues. They are:

• developing affordable and clean energy system
• health and wellbeing of B40
• health and weelbeing of ageing society
• future education
• quality education provision for vulnerable communities
• sustainable and smart manufacturing in agricultural sector
• migrants and refugees in Malaysian society
• drug abuse
• ethnic harmony

The one area that I'm toying with and considering is future education. While most future education issues tend to centre around how technology has changed the environment for education, I do not think that is the critical issue to focus. Technologies change and they change very frequently; it is the part of human in adapting to these changes that often becomes an issue. As Simon Sinek puts it, if one focuses on what and how of such issue, often the why gets forgotten. In particular my interest is in the spectrum of thinking of a human or an organisation organism with their product in the form of technologies. The finiteness of the human or organisation seem to set some form of inherent limitations in the way thinking is done (this theme is also alluded here in this post) and how to overcome this. Understanding this complex issue may help liberate us into better thinking (and hence better future education). This is also related to some things I have said to my own students: as science progress with exponentially growing body of knowledge, how can the future science student cope as they need to solve more difficult and complex problems. Partial solutions are known but they tend to refer to finite properties of the individual/organisation and prioritisation or contextualisation. 

Honing closer to home are our own cultural inhibitions to technical subjects like mathematics and related subjects like quantum theory. There are many studies (e.g. here) showing that the country's performance in TIMSS has dropped considerably the last few years and my gut feeling is that this is just the tip of the iceberg. So whatever future education issues that one wants to tackle for the country, answering why this is happening will be great.

One may ask why I am getting myself involved with these educational issues, far from my own research interest. Well, it actually began with the idea of getting the country ready for quantum technologies of the future. Letting my imagination runs wild has led me to write the above. Perhaps it is just me entertaining my personal frustration of driving quantum research here. Have been told many times that what I do is typified as 'syok sendiri'. At other times, plenty of discouragement and what bothers me the most is discouraging others as well. Just let them decide for themselves. In the end, one can't be bothered with what people say and just focus on what we can do.

Having mentioned Simon Sinek above, I knew about him much earlier and but recently his newer videos got to be recommended on my YouTube listing. Do listen to these when you have time.

A Different Turn

Two days ago, I was at a university up north attending a viva examination as an external examiner. It was for an area that only a handful of us know in the country, an area for which essentially my PhD supervisor Richard Ward is in (my PhD was on a different topic than this). The examination turned out to be good and one has the elated feeling of duty fulfillment, overseeing progress made in such area locally. However this 'joy' was cut short. As I was waiting for the plane to return home, received a whatsapp message regarding the restructuring of the institute. A new change.

The restructuring of the institute has occupied our minds ever since middle of last year. Plenty of discussions were made to see what is best for the institute and finally agreed upon some niche areas that could have given the institute a unique identity (see here). We even come up with a clever name for the institute to highlight our niche area, namely on disruptive science & technology. Initially we would like to keep this name a secret until we are sure that it is properly endorsed by the university. It was Mathematical Institute for Natural and Disruptive Sciences (MINDS). Unfortunately, this name will not see the light of the day. The meeting yesterday informed us that the restructuring will now take a different turn, which I will not reveal here as yet.

My immediate feeling after the meeting is betrayal; both betrayed and betraying. Our efforts thus far have gone back to naught and sincerely wished that we knew this much earlier. But much more damaging for me is that this happens under my watch. In a way, I felt that I have betrayed the original cause of our institute. Something that I have to bear for the rest of my life. In a way, I have been here before; plenty of disappointments in life. At this stage, I do not know what will happen next. For now, I try to comfort myself by saying that come what may, we (as in theoretical physics group) will continue to do the things we do; things that not many may have the courage to take up. I will just leave it at that.

Nuff Said

I think I have said too much yesterday at the risk of possibly affecting whatever cohesion we have. Do note that I value very much our existing cohesion and the trust that we have built. This is particularly critical when we are at the verge of restructuring the institute. But matters arising compelled me to say what I think is right and the opinions that I have held long dearly (science over other secondary matters). Having said that, I do entertain the possibility of oneself is wrong, which I expect the same of any other scientists. More so in matters of human affairs; more often than not, one does not have a single unique solution but probably multiple solutions with different strength and weaknesses (see here). Ultimately, one particular solution has to be picked out and this is normally done by the 'leader'. As such, being in the deputy position for quite some time (and being in the institute for so long), I worry that I am developing blindspots. It is usually wise to make sure that one is not in the position of power too long. For the record, I am not power crazy and will be willing to leave to make place for those who are more capable.

For now, I hope everyone refrain from aggravating whatever problems we are facing, and work more towards finding solutions. Finding faults is easy (because everyone has a weakness) but finding solutions needs more grey matter and creativity. Let us focus on rebuilding the institute according to what the university plans to have.

Pre-Restructuring Thoughts

This is my first post in 2019 and I will write about the institute's future and niche area.

It is perhaps an open secret that the institute will be undergoing restructuring process along with the rest of the university. One of the task given to us is to carve out niche areas perhaps unique to the institute itself, avoiding redundancies with say the Mathematics Department in the Faculty. Redundancy in itself is not necessarily bad and in fact is key to many technologies with critical components. Whether this is the case for our mathematical research perhaps is not clear. I certainly want to think that the institute has helped in many ways mathematical research in the university. Perhaps finding a unique identity to the institute is something that one should aim for after many years.

Each of us has one's own research passion and it is quite easy to be blinded into thinking that one's own research is more important or more fundamental or more difficult than another. To be able to objectively compare between fields, it is necessary to be actively involved in the research areas that one wants to compare. To master one particular research area already requires incredible feat; to be able to do more would probably take a few lifetimes. Comparing different fields is not our goal; more importantly is to ensure that such different fields synergize with each other. One hopes to have different groups working together for some common goals, which I hope will be realised in the future version of the institute. Another desirable thing to have is to get the right mix of birds and frogs (alluding to Dyson's categorization of researchers in his article in Notices of the AMS). Birds bring diverse ideas together and frogs do intricate details within one area. I would like to imagine myself as a bird, not a high-flying one but one that is close to the ground. I get very fascinated by mathematical topics that find their ways to physics in rather surprising ways. Each weekend I will normally scan the arXiv to see what new ideas are brewing; those that caught my eye are link-dumped at Equatorial Frequencies. Most of these will be left unread of course. Such scanning has helped me get some form of bird-eye's view of progress made in mathematical sciences. I hope this will be of use in looking for possible new directions for the institute.

One of the directions that could have been taken is to move to interdisciplinary research as I have raised many times (I'm also including areas within mathematics themselves). But what areas would be most natural for mathematicians to work with? The best way to answer is to see what available data there are on mathematical research publications. Some researchers have taken the time to look at this by constructing a map of mathematics. One map would be based on the paper submissions on the arXiv (see figure below):

The blue ones are those considered to be traditionally in mathematics. The purple ones are coming from physics. The red ones are computer science and also engineering. The green ones are statistics (but we will not consider this as distinct from mathematics for simplification). Physics has always been closed to mathematics and should have interacted more with mathematics. Reality on the ground is that most of our physics staff do very little theoretical work. Hence we should source more interactions from the other closely associated areas of computer science and engineering. In fact, I would have loved to see more computer scientists (particularly theoretical ones) to be more active in our institute. Engineering would be another but they are not quite well represented in the above map since arXiv is much biased on those areas that have established preprint culture and perhaps engineering has yet to be one. Another map that will show the engineering representation better is perhaps the map constructed from Zentralblatt data (see figure below).

The mathematical areas that are close to engineering are those in partial differential equations and numerical analysis. Note the heavy weighted lines from PDE and numerical analysis to fluid mechanics, thermodynamics and heat transfer, systems theory and control. Thus, engineering would be another source of interaction that the institute could place hope for. Having said that readiness and willingness of researchers (mathematicians, computer scientists and engineers) is a complex matter to deal with and we hope that we can overcome this challenge.

Back to carving niche areas, cryptography was one of the identified niche areas of the institute even before the current restructuring process takes place. This would however be too restrictive for the institute to base on and will exclude many other important established areas of the institute. To generalize this, one of us suggested disruptive technologies (see here and here) which will include further things like internet of things, data science and others often quoted for IR 4.0 (see for instance these examples). This would make the institute heavily based on (available) technologies (note most technologies are disruptive in nature). To be more far-sighted, one should also include the sciences that drive them. One particular area whose technology is expected to change the IT landscape is quantum sciences, an area which I dream of establishing firmly in UPM (time is running out since I will be retiring in a few years time). In fact, the idea was there when I joined ITMA last time and we suggested the field of study on Quantum Science and Technology (way back in 2002 - see figure below).

This initiative (experimental side) stopped just after I left ITMA. Today, the term Quantum Science and Technology is already a common term. IOP for instance has created a journal with such name. Here is a relatively recent interview on Japan initiatives in quantum science and technology.

Now, quantum information science fits well in the niche area of science that drives near-future disruptive technology. It actually took about 70-80 years from the beginning of quantum science to reach the point of precise manipulation of single quantum particles. Today there are many available technologies of doing so. However technologically we are far away from doing this in our labs (though there is a possibility of accessing such technology with external help, which we are considering). The best option for us is to take the theoretical (or mathematical) options for quantum information science research which I think we are able to do (provided support and enough manpower).

Having said this, it is not about serving my own interests in doing the institute's restructuring exercise. We have to take into account for what is natural and what serves the institute better. For instance, mathematical physics which is an important area that connects physics and mathematics (see map of mathematics in the figures above) will now take a back seat in favour of mathematical engineering. This is to attract more engineers to the institute (which I do hope will happen). An area that seems to fall out of favour in this action will be our work on hyperbolic spaces and cusp forms. Unless of course if we can still relocate such research by making it into something applicable like quantum money.

Another area that I hope the institute can pursue is the area of data science, which the institute had already eyed on before this. Now while most people are imagining the data explosion, my concern is actually more on some inherent (human or otherwise) limitations of obtaining useful finite information and that contextualization is probably needed (see here). On the other hand, we need new inventive ways to produce useful information. One such tool is the idea of complex networks (an area that I hope the institute pursue), which has already show many applications and some may even be counter-intuitive (see e.g. here).

All these ideas are ambitious of course. Ideas will remain ideas unless they are worked on by our researchers. It is here that we wish that we get all the support that we can to make our institute stronger and sustainable.