A postscript from Glasgow

Though I returned from the Glasgow meeting I posted about a couple of times last week, I thought I'd write one more post to highlight that I took the opportunity to meet up with my PhD student Isaac, who has been living in Glasgow and working remotely from there for a while.  He has submitted his thesis now and awiting the viva.  He gave me the good news that he will start as a postdoc in Glasgow, at least on a rather short term position, but giving him a little space to do something new and look for a longer-term position.  

I took the opportunity to take a picture of him standing next to the poster I prepared:

Sauchiehall Street

During my visit to Glasgow, I have stayed in a hotel on Sauchiehall Street, which extends from being one of the main shopping streets in the city centre, to the University area in the West End.  It is a street that features in our family lore, because my parents lived there in separate flats when they were young:  My mum because she had left home nearby and was working around there, while my dad, who is from London, had gone through training with the BBC and had been posted to their outpost in the West End of Glasgow.  They met at a party hosted by one of their friends, and the rest is history - or at least means that I am now writing this message.

 Here's a view down the street.  The flat with the "For Rent" board outside is where my dad lived.  My mum's old flat is just about visible somewhere  where the stone changes from red to brown.  My hotel is in the first block of the brown buildings.

The view behind me is somewhat more impressive, with Kelvingrove museum and art gallery, Kelvingrove Park, and the University.

At the Quantum Technologies for Fundamental Physics meeting in Glasgow

I'm in Glasgow for a community meeting as part of the Quantum Technologies for Fundamental Physics (QTFP) programme.  I'm a PI (principal investigator) of one of the grants awarded in the programme, working in the use of quantum technolgies (quantum computers in my case) for fundamental physics (nuclear physics).  We've just been through a several-year cycle of the first round of these grants and this meeting is designed in part, I think, to wrap up this first round.  

The meeting has opened up with a welcome message, suggesting that we'd be hearing from each of the projects for updates. That's not the case, as they rejected my offer to talk on my project (and no doubt others) but I think there are talks on all the "major" projects on the core part of the funding scheme as originally envisioned.   A lot of the progress reported seems to be carrying on what people are already doing and relabelling it as "quantum technology" as a way of leveraging money, with some token efforts to actually make some innovative developements along new quantum lines, which is a shame, and I suspect that the original QTFP vision was rather too narrow.   One might hope, at least, that the work will lead to exciting developments in quantum technologies that have wider benefits beyond a straight continuation of the UK particle physics community.  And yes, it looks like they might, and that may be a benefit from the projects. 

Last week at the Quantum Simulation and Quantum Walks conference I asked a Scotland-based researcher if I'd see her at this QTFP meeting.  She ruefully reported that she felt excluded from it, as it seemed to her to mainly be a narrow way for detector technologists to further their pet projects without really reaching out to a wider quantum community (and she, as I, did not hear about the scheme to begin with as it was not aimed at us). Well, so far, it does seem that way to me.  But I hope there will be something that's really made new connections between (sub-)fields to open up new possibilities.  I will report back if so.

Here's a picture of me walking past the main old building at the University, on my way to the very helpful print shop who had printed the poster that I wrote last week in Italy and sent to them here.  I didn't get assigned a talk but I will show a poster in the poster session tomorrow.

edit: Oh, I should perhaps point out that the organisers of the QTFP programme set up a special edition of the journal New Journal of Physics to showcase results from the various projects.  Here is the contribution from my project, and here is the list of (only six) papers in the collection that show off the scheme.

edit 2: The third talk, on the QSimFP project, is impressive - it brings together a diverse range of expertise to do interesting and novel things with analogue quantum simulators to study things like black holes.  They have a large collaborations with a good number of experimentalists, a good number of theorists, a good split between quantum tech expertise and fundamental physics.  They have really taken the right approach to how the idea of "QTFP" should be enacted.

December book: Bayesian Optimization by Peng Liu

December's book in the book-a-month project is Bayesian Optimisation by Peng Liu.  You won't have seen it in the photo I took for the original post where I said I'd start working through my books in a semi-meaningful way, because I got the book after that post.  I succumbed to a mailshot from Springer offering a selection of books for £15 each - falling into some kind of trap of thinking that they must be good value at £15 each when the list price is much higher (£55 in this case).  Perhaps Springer also knows that I see books as positional goods, too, and knew I would crumble.  

Well, I felt like learning more about Bayesian Optimisation would be a good thing, and hence bought the book and started reading.  Setting aside the intellectual quality of the book for a moment, what struck me is that it is a very badly designed and made book.  All the £15 books I got were sent to a print-on-demand service, and the quality is a bit variable.  One arrived with the pages not properly cut.  The Liu book, did not suffer that, but it very much gives the impression that it was not designed to exist in hard copy.  The margins are ragged, there are mis-sized figures with poor resolution, and a lot of blank space at the bottom of pages since a figure follows on the next page and there wasn't enough room to put it at the bottom of the partly-empty pages.  All things that would not happen in a professionally-designed book.  Still, ultimately it is the intellectual content that is important.   How did that shape up?

Well, I have not read the whole thing, but read through the first half, starting with the first chapter giving an overview of the topic, chapter 2 on Gaussian processes and chapter 3 on "Bayesian decision theory and expected improvement".  I think it is fair to say that I got the gist of chapter 1, made sense of little bits of chapter 2, and found chapter 3 incomprehensible.  I'm not even sure how to describe why I didn't understand it, because I don't even have enough understanding to do that.  In the end it just felt like word spaghetti as every noun as it moved through the book seemed to pick up more adjectives "eventual multistep lookahead marginal gain".  I think if there were (more) specific examples to work through, it would have helped.  Chapter 2 did have one, although it was a rather abstract example, and that did aid understanding a bit.

I can't help but feel I am at fault - too dim - to understand the book, and that may be the case, but it's also possible that I should be able to make sense of a book about this kind of technical subject given my prior experience.  If only I had learned anything from it, I might be able to calculate which of these two positions is the most likely. 

Anyway.  I'm afraid I can't recommend it, though I may revisit if and when I learn the topic from some other source to see if I can retrospectively make sense of it from the position of already knowing the material.

Some pictures:

Me holding the book

An example of empty space because
a figure is coming up on the next page

Last Day at QSQW

 It's day 4 at Quantum Simulation and Quantum Walks.  We've had the conference dinner:  Foodwise so-so for vegetarians, but it was a social event more than anything, and I had a nice chat with the people I was sitting near.  Smalltalk is not one of my primary skills, but we managed to keep the conversation going.  The guy opposite me (Bryce Gadway from Penn State) bonded over some of the weird things our kids find on YouTubeKids. 

We've also had the excursion, which was a guided tour of a tunnel dug into the side of a hill in Naples.  It was started in the 1500s as part of an aquaduct system, then expanded under the auspices of the Bourbon King Ferdinand II of the two Sicilies (of which Naples was a part at the time).  This was mainly to provide him with an escape route to the sea, ordered in the period leading up to the 1848 revolution.  Ferdinand left Naples before the tunnels were finished and they were abandoned, until their utility was rediscovered in World War 2 when they provided useful bomb shelters.  After the war, the tunnels were filled up with rubble from the destroyed city, and later used to store impounded cars (many of which are still there).  Only in the last 20 years or so have people started to clear them out and turn them into a tourist destination, operated by the multistory garage which is carved into the opening sections of the tunnels (winner of "Worlds Coolest Car Park 2018" award).  Here is a picture of some of the tour party in what was the old aquaduct

 

I gave my talk yesterday, and had some interesting discussion afterwards with people who seemed to find it interesting.  I've learnt a lot about quantum walk and quantum cellular automata, which seems like less of a niche thing with limited application, as I had assumed, but an alternative and complete way to think about quantum problems.  Indeed, there is book by 't Hooft describing Cellular Automata as an "interpretation" of quantum mechancs.  Let's see if I keep up any of the momentum of the interest I have picked up from being here in my future research.  At the very least, I've made some connections to people who are working on things that are closer to what I am doing than I had suspected.

They took a conference photo.  I am right at the back and not terribly easy to spot.   After they had taken several pictures, a couple of latecomers arrived and one stood half in front of me, and that's the photo they shared.

 

QSQW in Naples

It's my first time in Naples and I'm here for the Quantum Simulation and Quantum Walks conference.  I was sent an email about the conference a while ago, and while I do not work directly in Quantum Walks, I'm interested enough in them, and I do work in quantum simulation.  I think, after having sat through the first day, that I am slightly here under false pretences and the quantum simulation talks generally have some kind of link to the idea of quantum walks or quantum cellular automata.  Well,  I submitted an honest abstract, and they selected it for a talk, so ... hopefully they will like it when I give it on Thursday morning. 

I don't really know anyone here – at least I didn't when I arrived, but at least have managed to talk to some people, including someone who turns out to be married to one of my colleagues at Surrey.  Small world, eh?  Well, perhaps not surprising that two academics working in a similar are should be married, I suppose. 

I arrived in the mid-evening yesterday, after sunset.  There was a prominent moon, with Jupiter visible just below, so I made use of the fact that if you can set your phone somewhere quite still, then it does a pretty good job of capturing nightime scenes with a long exposure.  It helped that the silhouette of Mount Vesuvius was in the shot:

 

Surrey dropping Elsevier deal

I came aross the following story about my institution dropping its current Elsevier journal subscription deal which is arranged as part of the UK-wide JISC organisation:

 

The full story is here.  It seems like the general financial difficulties in UK Higher Education, as well as particular choices at Surrey have led to this.  At a time when Universities, including Surrey, have been cutting costs by getting rid of staff, I am not at all sad to see them cutting costs by avoiding handing so much money to the academic publishers, who take our publicly-funded research without payment, then sell it back to us, all the while getting us to perform the peer-review for free. 

I much prefer the model from the likes of SciPost, where I perform my sole editorial work these days.  An online journal with low costs met through sponsorship, where neither scientists nor readers pay in the sharing of research