Obviously, this is a riff on my favorite Hamilton song The Room Where It Happens.
I covered OrganJet and GuardianWings case in my MBA Service Management class (via zoom).
Dr. Tayur,
I wanted to reach out to say thank you for covering healthcare during this class. Prior to joining the MBA program I worked for Strata Decision Technology doing cost accounting for health systems. Your explanation to the class was terrific in helping open people’s eyes to how healthcare actually works.
On a personal note, your innovation and thoughtfulness on solving a real problem with OrganJet is inspiring. One of my life goals is to figure out how to create opportunities to lift motivated people out of poverty. Hearing your stories yesterday strengthened my resolve that people who care can make a difference.
The lyrics of the Hamilton song seem most appropriate:
No one really knows how the game is played
The art of the trade
How the sausage gets made
We just assume that it happens
But no one else is in
The room where it happens
You may recall from an earlier post where I received this email:
Hello professor,
Hope you are doing well. Thanks for the great lecture today. I really enjoyed reading both the SAP and SmartOps cases today. It is rare to hear from the case protagonist and it was a joy to learn about what actually happened.
Additionally, I have received an offer from McKinsey and Amazon and I was on the fence about the consulting offer as I want to be in the techindustry long term. However, I heard your experience working with people from consulting and particularly folks from McKinsey and it made the value of pursuing consulting very clear. Thanks for that.
Thanks for the great class. I look forward to seeing you next week.
Indeed, 2020 can be considered A Year of Living Cautiously (a riff on the movie title The Year of Living Dangerously), but I thought The Zoom Where It Happens captures this year even better.
Indeed, one of most fulfilling activities this year was creating and delivering Quantum Integer Programming course (all via Zoom), in addition to teaching the PhD course Healthcare Operations.
Here are three Zoom presentations that may be of interest:
Reimagining the US Transplant System (Host: Jerry Davis, University of Michigan, March 2020)
Quantum Integer Programming (Hosts: Fengqi You, Oliver Gao, Cornell University, April 2020)
Unconventional Computing (Host: Anant Agrawal, TEDxCMU2020, July 2020).
Now for the real fun part.
The most inconvenient time for a very important Zoom was at 445am. With my collaborators, led by Aaron D. (at NUS), we presented our proposal to a very serious (and skeptical) committee in Singapore.
What was our proposal about? Recall my earlier post on Pocket Quantum Computers where I light-heartedly wrote:
Let me introduce you to the follow up of Book One:
Neo-Quantum Organon, Book Two: Chip-based Ising Computing Machine (CICM).
An Ising Computing Machine (ICM) obtains the desired solution to a combinatorial optimization problem through collective state computing rather than sequential state computing.
ICM relies on the Ising model that is known to be Turing-complete, meaning that it can solve any classical computing problem. ICM is analog in nature, intrinsically offering an entirely different type of parallel computing than digital computing devices.
ICM can be made using superconducting Josephson junctions, such as the D-Wave machine, but this requires liquid helium cooling (temperature less than 15 milliKelvins), is the size of a room, has 2048 qubits, limited connectivity (and so is not a Universal Ising solver, 5600 couplings, which have limited fidelity), requires 25kW of power to operate and retails for over USD $15 million.
Chip-based ICM (CICM) that we are envisioning operates at room temperature, is of size 10 square centimeters (or less), has power consumption of less than 10 w, with 10000+ qubits.
Crazy? Well, here is the email from Singapore:
Congratulations! We are pleased to inform that your proposal (Non-traditional Computing Enabled Through the Ising Model) submitted to the 24th CRP Call has been recommended for the CRP award.
The CRP International Evaluation Panel (IEP) has assessed that the proposal is interesting, timely and ambitious. It has potential for scientific breakthroughs and disruptive innovations in the field beyond CMOS/ unconventional computing.
We will be in touch with you shortly on the next steps to finalise the award, thank you.
NATIONAL RESEARCH FOUNDATION
PRIME MINISTER’S OFFICE
SINGAPORE
Channeling Austin Powers:
Yeah Baby, Yeah!!
