Everything Everywhere All at Once

I was in Washington again.

A few weeks ago, in Professor Tayur Goes to Washington, I went to Johns Hopkins to talk about global supply chains and somehow ended up wandering through Lioness, Reacher, Slow Horses, The Diplomat and Silo.

This time I was back for the annual meeting of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE). I was elected in 2017. (Looking Back: October 7, 2017).

Different cast. Different plot.

Mostly.

One pleasure this year was welcoming Mark Liu, former Chairman of TSMC, into our section at the Academy. These days it is almost impossible to say “semiconductors” without saying “supply chains,” and almost impossible to say “supply chains” without eventually arriving at geopolitics. As I did, perhaps inevitably, in War and Peace (and Pulp Fiction!). Then, an entertaining Golden Bridge dinner with Ed Frank, a Carnegie Mellon alumnus (and trustee) whose daughter—a CMU alumna—just won an Emmy, and Jim Yurko of Apple, talking about Materials Engineering!

There was another CMU reason to celebrate. Farnam Jahanian, our President, was also inducted this year. It was quite a class: Jennifer Doudna and Demis Hassabis were being inducted too.  As I wrote in Miami Nice!, he is the architect of the historic $3 billion gift that will propel Carnegie Mellon’s expansion in Miami.

Three billion dollars.

I founded SmartOps. I understand scaling.

But even I find this impressively excessive.

Naturally, we now arrive at Hollywood.

Todd Spangler at Variety, who had asked me about Bob Iger’s tenure at Disney around this year’s Oscars, now wanted my thoughts on the biggest Hollywood business story of the year: the Paramount–Warner Bros. combination, and what it means for streaming.

My glamorous Hollywood contribution:

“You don’t want to immediately combine the two streaming services, because people won’t pay the sum of the two subscription prices.”

Apparently thirty-plus years of Operations Management eventually qualifies one to have opinions about Hollywood!

Supply chains → Streaming chains.

I can live with that.

And then there was Eva Marie Saint.

The luminous Oscar winner from On the Waterfront and Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest died recently at 102.

A little-known fact: she was an alumna of Pittsburgh’s International Poetry Forum. So was Annie Dillard (also passed away recently) whose An American Childhood is a particular delight, not least because she grew up here, yes, in Pittsburgh. (You know that I am on its Board of Directors.)

Back to films.

The RAGS Family Foundation is supporting Tasveer, and I particularly like the Market. This year it brings twelve feature projects in late-stage development from South Asian filmmakers around the world. A festival celebrates films:

A market creates the conditions under which films actually get made, financed, distributed and seen.

Come to think of it, that is a supply chain too.

Ideas → filmmakers → financing → production → festivals → distributors → audiences.

Operations Management professors can ruin almost anything!

I am delighted to join the Film Market Jury for the upcoming Tasveer Film Festival & Market, alongside Aparna Purohit, CEO of Aamir Khan Productions:

Lagaan (2001), Dil Chahta Hai (2001), Rang De Basanti (2006), Taare Zameen Par (2007), 3 Idiots (2009), PK (2014), Dangal (2016).

There is an additional pleasure this year. Breaking the Code, the documentary about Kanwal Rekhi, the godfather of Silicon Valley’s Indian tech wave, will screen at Tasveer. I have come on as one of its Executive Producers.

I may need three badges: Supporter, Juror and Executive Producer.

This time, unlike my last Washington visit, I made it to Rasika.

Dosa. Bhindi. Saag. Raita. Naan.

And, of course, a martini: Nectar of Soma.

Everything Everywhere All at Once.

That would have been a perfectly good place to stop.

Then quantum showed up. Thrice.

First, Quanfluence, based in Bengaluru, with whom I have been working for a couple of years now, announced that it had raised $10 million to build a full photonic quantum computer. Congratulations! Regular readers have met Biman Chattopadhyay, Nikilesh B.R. and Anil Prabhakar (IIT-Madras) in Dear Jensen—It’s Not Just About the GPU, where the Quantum-inspired FPGA-HBM machine – a stepping stone to a quantum computer – was configured for the algorithm rather than the other way around: Algorithm-First Hardware.

Second, my paper (QSOIS2026) on Quantum Sensing was accepted in Informs Journal on Data Science:

Quantum Sensing as an Optimization-Inference Stack.

Third LinkedIn chimed in:

Dear Sridhar,

We are pleased to invite you to speak at the Quantum Hardware, Software, and Sensing Conference 2027, taking place February 22–24, 2027, at Clarion Hotel The Edge, Tromsø, Norway.

Apparently, Everywhere really does mean Everywhere.