What’s that in my hand you ask Tess dog? Yes, I know I said that I’d been trapped into being an early adopter one too many times and I had finally learned a lesson. Yes, I know I said that. But my old Treo 650 had totally died (different from “really” died, or just plain “died”). I mean, as in it would regularly crash and I would get a battery overheat white screen of death. So I really did need a new phone. Why could I just get a new regular cell phone? I made the mistake of playing with the iPhone at that kiosk. Yes, it was the deadly kiosk that did it. But look at it this way, Tess dog, now I’ll get to take more photos of you since my Treo’s camera really stunk. Exciting, no? Hey stop licking my iPhone.
Rethinking Scientific Talks
I’ve seen many a scientific talk, ranging from the truely inspiring, to the incredibly painful. I’ve also given many a scientific talk, ranging mostly to the incredibly painful end of the spectrum. Stuck in back of my head when I’m giving a not so good talk, there has always been a little devil saying “Come on, Dave, there has got to be a better way to give a talk!” Well usually I just ignore that little devil (“see him again on the forth of July”) but today watching a colloquium by Richard Anderson inspired me to think some crazy thoughts. Not because of the style of Richards talk, but instead because Richard is involved in a host of collaborative technology and its use in education, including the very cool Classroom presenter which I highly recommend for tablet based teaching.
Okay, so let me dream up a new way to give a scientific talk. First of all, I think we should take a lesson from Stephen Hawking. No, not a lesson in general relativity (allthough I’m quite certain that would be a great lesson, or at least a very hard lesson), but I mean I am totally jealous of Hawking’s speaking abilities. Why? Because he gets to write his talk before hand, plug it into his hand dandy speech synthesizer (“This synthesiser is by far the best I have heard, because it varies the intonation, and doesn’t speak like a Dalek. The only trouble is that it gives me an American accent.”), and then lets it rip. He just gets to sit back and enjoy his talk. Now I don’t think this is where I want scientific talks to be going totally. I don’t want prerecorded audio/video to be the only medium available for a talk. I mean sure, it is great to have resources like talks at the KITP, but I think scientific talks serve a broader goal than just the discinimation of a non-interactive lecture. But, let’s face it, giving a talk is hard. I mean live television, for example, is hard. But actors get to do multiple takes. They get to slowly think out the plan of their talk in advance and then don’t suffer from execution problems since they get to correct their mistakes. Certainly good speakers are the ones who can execute on demand, but isn’t there some way that we can use technology in an inovative manner to help bad speakers like me?
Deep breath. Okay so what am I advocating. First of all I want better presentation software. This software should allow me to prerecord parts of my talk. I should be able to then play this back at my own pace, stoping the prerecorded parts when I need to, jumping to parts which I’ve also recorded which explain tangential thoughts, as well as the ability for me to give a normal talk at any point AND I want this normal part of the talk to be recorded for posteriety so that I can use it if need be when I want to. I want giving a scientific talk to be more like being a music producer who can also sing their own song. I want my good explanations to be repeated and my bad ones to be easily thrown away. One inspiration for this is a talk which Manny Knill gives on fault-tolerance. As far as I can tell he has a big pdf file with all of the details of his work and he can easily move hyperlink style through the different relevant bits of information. This allows for a level of customization which the standard linear powerpoint doesn’t make natural (allthough I’m guessing there is a way to get powerpoint to imitate this, I just haven’t tried this or seen many people use it.)
Second I want vast communication to be occuring while I give a talk. One of the beauties of classroom presenter is that students can write on their tablet PCs and then send you up what they are writing. And its been my experience that the best talks are the talks where a great questioner is in the audience (for example any talk with Dorit Aharonov in the audience is destined to be a better talk!) Now the danger with allowing communication between the audience memebers during a talk is that they will be distracting. So first of all I think the in audience communication should not be point to point between audience members, but on a shared medium. Of great importance in this setup is people expressing questions or points they do not understand during a talk. I mean I can’t recall how many times I’ve given a talk and wondered how lost everyone is. With real time feedback it should be possible for talks to be adjusted on the fly to meet the demands of the audience. Further I think it can also help in that with a wide spectrum of viewers, some of the more informed viewers can actually help avert bad questions, which is probably almost as important as having a good questioner in the audience.
Okay, well the technology for carrying out talks like that I describe above is probably workable today. I think we lecture in particular styles because they have worked in the past, but I also think that we could probably use technology to allow us to give talks in an even more coherent and fullfilling manner. Well maybe I’m just dreaming, but someday, someday, I hope to give a heck of a talk that isn’t just me fumbling around with the laser pointer and mumbling something about hidden subgroups.
Curious
A documentary featuring Caltech researchers to be shown on a few PBS stations nationwide.
I say, We can dance, We can dance, Everything out of control
A psuedo-paper dance today: a perspective I wrote just appeared in Science. The perspective is about this paper: “Symmetrized Characterization of Noisy Quantum Processes,” Joseph Emerson, Marcus Silva, Osama Moussa, Colm Ryan, Martin Laforest, Jonathan Baugh, David G. Cory, and Raymond Laflamme, Science 317, 1893 (2007) Check out my raytracing skillz in the picture accompanying the perspective 🙂
Book Sale Bonanza
Yesterday I went to the Friends of the Seattle Public Library’s book sale. It’s always fun to see a line stretching out into the distance for people waiting to get a chance to buy used books at less than one dollar a book. Here was my take this year, where I happily picked up a copy of Messiah and Griffiths, both of which I sadly never had in my library:
Nonlinear Programming (Siam-Ams Proceedings, Vol 4)
by Richard W. Cottle
Introduction to Mathematical Programming With Courseware
Introduction to Electrodynamics
Kinetic Theory of Gases
Quantum Mechanics, Volume II
Introduction to Cybernetics
Atoms, Molecules, and Chemical Change
Revealing the Universe
The Second Law: An Introduction to Classical and Statistical Thermodynamics
Functions of complex variables: An introduction
Machine Learning: Paradigms and Methods (Special Issues of Artificial Intelligence)
Thirty Years That Shook Physics
AI: The Tumultuous History of the Search for Artificial Intelligence
Introductory Nuclear Physics
Einstein: Life and Times
Tuxedo Park : A Wall Street Tycoon and the Secret Palace of Science That Changed the Course of World War II
Statistics, Third Edition
Astronomy of the 20th Century
Great Books of the Western World Vol. 16 Ptolemy, Copernicus, Kepler
Black holes, quasars & the universe
Not a bad haul for a few bucks. Onto the queue you go, books!
And Thanks For All The Fish
Michael Nielsen’s switchin’ fields. I’m envious but also sad. Envious that he gets to do something totally cool and new, but sad that I won’t be randomly bumping into him at conferences where I try to explain to him some crazy idea I’m working on and then get to hear his wonderful laugh at my silly ideas. Oh yeah, and when am I ever going to get to use this joke again, huh?
On the more serious side of things, I myself often think about what I would do if I wasn’t working in quantum computing. Which always leads me to think about why I’m still in the field in the first place (history ain’t a good reason, in fact I’d say it is the worst reason of all.) There are mostly two or three things that really keep me in the field these days. One is that I really really really want to see a quantum computer built. And I think the current roadmap ain’t got nothing to do with how a large scale quantum computer will be built. I’ve always said that if I could see how some scheme for quantum computing would really work to build a large quantum computer I’d drop my theorists clothes and work towards building the damn thing. And I work today in the field because I’m naive enough to think that I might be able to contribute to the more radical ideas I think are needed for building a quantum computer.
The second thing which keeps me going these days is a personal quirk. When I first started working in quantum computing I was trying to solve NP-complete problems efficiently on a quantum computer. I was young and I was naive, yes. But I was also drawn to the promise of the power of quantum algorithms. And damnit I still want to come up with an algorithm for a quantum computer which is of some importance. Yep, I really really really want to at least break a public key cryptosystem!
Finally I would say that the other thing which keeps me in quantum computing these days is just to see what Scott Aaronson will do next. Actually what I really mean by this is I do think that quantum information science provides an interesting insight into computation and into physics. Quantum computing beyond the hype of a quantum computer. Quantum computing for its own intellectual sake of revealing more about our physical and computational universe. Quantum computing because (to channell Feynman’s ghost) our world is quantum damnit, and all these views of the interaction betwen physics and computer science which just go with classical computing are interesting but fundamentally lacking.
Of course all this thinking about what keeps me in the field of quantum computing or even in academia also is just my way of avoiding answering the question of what I would do if I wasn’t in the field. But that’s easy for me to answer I guess. I’d be at a computer startup (my original goal in life was to work at Apple, you know) or trying to get a job at someplace like D.E. Shaw where my friends who work there tell me exciting stories of interesting problems and silly sums of money which will let them do what they want in a few short years. Or maybe I’d be a lift operator at a ski resort 🙂
2007 MacArthur Awards
MacArthur awards for 2007 have been announced. Seattle scores two, Yoky Matsuoka (right here in my own department!) and Mark Roth at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. My old alma mater (“nourishing mother?”) Caltech received two awards, and my grad school alma mater Berkeley received one.
I think I am begining to understand why I have an inferiority complex.
Number One Mere Technical School
Sports Illustrated says that Caltech is number one! Err, had the number one college sports prank:
1. The Great Rose Bowl Hoax
School: Rose Bowl
Year: 1961
Today, Caltech has no official mascot, much less a football team. But until 1993, the Rose Bowl was home to the mere technical school’s football squad — as well as the culminating event of college football. In 1961, a team of 14 students decided to capitalize on the event’s irony by changing the University of Washington’s flip-card stunt at half time.
A student disguised himself as an eager reporter from a high school newspaper and interviewed a cheerleader to get the details. They found that by surreptitiously altering 2,232 instruction sheets, the entire Husky fan section could be duped into displaying any pattern the “Fiendish Fourteen” desired — without the crowd realizing it. They stole the instructions, printed modified copies, and replaced them.
On game day, the college card collage played out as expected for the first 11 patterns, lulling the crowd into a sense of security and drawing the lenses of (color) national television. Subtle alterations to the 12th pattern resulted in a Husky that looked an awful lot like a beaver — the dam-building totem of many technical schools. The 13th stunt came off as a mistake: “HUSKIES” spelled backwards. And finally, the 14th stunt spelled “CALTECH,” and it all made sense, casting silence upon the stadium for a few moments. Soon, laughter set in among the crowd and panic among the Washington cheerleaders, who cancelled the final stunt, which was wisely left unadjusted by the pranksters.
But, ahem “Mere technical school?” Note that MIT didn’t even make the list. 😉
Hail to the Cool Nerd King
Back From Japan
Back from Kyoto, Japan where I attended AQIS07. What time is it right now anyway? (And is there a selective pressure in today’s scientific fields towards people who suffer less jet lag?) AQIS 2008 will be held in Seoul, South Korea.
Here is a picture of me enjoying the awesome hospitality of our hosts at a delicious dinner. This was a dinner held on top of a creek in the mountains north of Kyoto (picture thanks to the quantum computing picture achive, a.k.a Charlie Bennett).
There we a lot of good talks at AQIS, the program can be found here. My favorite line of the entire conference was definitely when one quantum information theorist responded, when asking why a particular quantity was used in a proof, “because we are trying to keep Bob from doing something stupid.” Something about designing proofs guided by keeping the protocol participants from being stupid struck me as quite funny.
The talk which I liked the most was probably the talk by Alexandre Blais (Université de Sherbrooke) on coupling superconducting qubits to microwaves. Much fantastic work has been recently performed (most?) at Yale on coupling superconducting qubits to microwaves (see here for example.) What is cool about this setup is that one can achieve coupling between the superconducting qubits and light which is in a strong-coupling limit, much as is done in cavity QED. Strong-coupling means that the light and qubit coupling is much stronger than other couplings of these two systems to the rest of the world (i.e. such as the rate at which the qubit decoheres or the photons leak out of the cavity you are using.) In particular this allows for very robust coupling/transmission of quantum information between the superconducting qubit and light. What was exciting about Alexandre’s talk was at the end of his talk about recent experimental results from Yale to be published soon about the coupling of two superconducting qubits to each other using the microwave field as an intermediary. Very cool stuff. It seems to me that this offers many of the benefits of traditional cavity QED for building a quantum computer, but in a much more scalable manner than is achievable in cavity QED. It definitely will be interesting to watch as these systems become better characterized and as more complex devices get implemented.
Update: This work is now on the archive at 0708.2135. I