This past three days have been a (divine) confluence of Academic Hedonism (Quantum!) and Real-world Hedonism (Robb Report!).
Black Bag is a 2025 American spy thriller film directed by Steven Soderbergh. It stars Cate Blanchett, Michael Fassbender, Marisa Abela, Tom Burke, Naomie Harris, Regé-Jean Page, and Pierce Brosnan.
Got back from spending a couple of days in Boston (where I enjoyed a Vesper at Alden & Harlow, a quiet lunch at Harvest, sneaked in a movie, Black Bag, at Chestnut Hill Superlux, and, quite accidentally, had a front-row seat at a late night Fashion Show at Liberty Hotel) last evening, to wonderful – McLaren and ice-cream (Butter Pecan, if you must know) worthy – weather in Pittsburgh, after presenting our results of Quantum GAGA at BBN-Raytheon offices, as part of the DARPA site-visit, where I opened with this 1-page summary of the Quantum Technology Group, which will also likely be the opening of my March 21st talk (as you know from Quantum Surge), QuOROM: Quantum, OR and OM, at the 75thAnniversary Celebration Academic Symposium at Tepper.
I woke up this morning to this nice email (see There’s Something About Money!):
On behalf of the Quantum 2.0 Technical Program Committee, we are pleased to inform you that your paper has been accepted for an in-person presentation at Quantum 2.0 Conference which will be held from 1-5 June 2025 at the Hilton San Francisco, CA, USA.
Paper Title: Quantum Money Using Differential Phase Encoding
Presented papers will be published on the Society’s publishing platform…
So, I decided to check out the website, and as I navigated through it, found this wonderful link, and even as an outsider, I could immediately recognize 5 winners of the Physics Nobel (Ashkin, Aspect, Cohen-Tannoudji, Wineland and Zeilinger):
Celebrate 100 Years of Quantum
The United Nations has designated 2025 as the International Year of Quantum in recognition of 1925 being a seminal year for quantum mechanics. Optica Publishing Group commemorates 100 years of quantum information science and technology (QIST) developments with selected content from its publications.
My first foray into physics hardware – through 2020 Tayur Prize, see Roll Over Turing – in collaboration with faculty (notably Anil Prabhakar) and students at IIT-Madras, resulted in publication in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, where Isaac Newton, Michael Faraday, Benjamin Franklin and Alan Turing have also published, which I (in honor of Sade Carnot) had retitled as
Réflexions sur la puissance de calcul de la lumière.
Now, my recent hardware initiative, Quantum Money is the result of 2024 Tayur Challenge. How should I rename it for this post, I wondered, and decided to go with the French translation of:
Reflections on the monetary power of light.
Talking about IIT-Madras and Nobel Physicists, this blurb from Geoffrey Hinton (see NSF Engineering Distinguished Lecture) attracted my attention:
Some books about the development of neural networks describe the underlying mathematics while others describe the social history. This book presents the mathematics in the context of the social history. It is a masterpiece.
The author of Why Machines Learn is:
Anil Ananthaswamy is the recipient of the Distinguished Alum Award, the highest award given by IIT Madras to its graduates, for his contributions to science writing.
I’ve been to the Harvest in Harvard Square many times … but not since last century.
Also, I just got Anil’s book, and am looking forward to checking it out.
I will see “Black Bag” soon. Cheers, Kathy