SQUAN 2007
Indo-US Shared Vision Workshop on Soft, Quantum and Nano Computing (SQUAN 2007): February 22-25, 2007
DEI hosted the Indo-US Shared Vision Workshop on Soft, Quantum and Nano Computing (SQUAN-2007) [1] in February 2007 under the auspices of the Indo-US Science and Technology Forum in collaboration with IIT Kanpur, IIT Delhi, University of Louisville, Bell Labs and several other Indian and American universities and industries. It witnessed four days of buzzing activity in Soft, Quantum and Nano Computing with a wide spectrum of topics being discussed including photonic and NMR based quantum computing, nano computing, fuzzy rule based systems, genetic languages, systems analysis and design, parallel soft computing and unifying paradigms. It witnessed leading researchers from across the globe in the field of computing cutting across departments of Computer Science, Information Technology, Physics and Chemistry present their latest cutting-edge research work indicating the current impact of Computing on Science and Technology.
Dr. Lov Grover, Distinguished Member of Technical Staff, Bell Labs and originator of the famous Grover's algorithm gave the first vision talk entitled 'Quantum algorithms'. In the ensuing sessions, there was active participation from 65 delegates with 23 invited presentations by resource persons from top academic and research institutes in India and United States including Bell Labs, Michigan Technological University, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, University of Maryland, University of North Carolina and University of California at Berkeley from US and Indian Institutes of Technology Kanpur, Delhi and Kharagpur; Indian Institute of Science Bangalore, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research Mumbai, Indian Statistical Institutes at Kolkata and Delhi; Raman Research Institute Bangalore and Dayalbagh Educational Institute, Agra from India. Vision talks were delivered by Prof. Debabrata Goswami, IIT Kanpur; Prof. Nikhil Pal, ISI Kolkata; Prof. Kalyanmoy Deb, IIT Kanpur; and Prof. Richard Superfine, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. There was a session in distance mode through webcast over the Internet, notably from Prof. Umesh Vazirani from University of California at Berkeley.
One of the notable observations that emerged from the Workshop was that there is an urgent and pressing need to promote education and awareness about the futuristic computing technologies like Quantum and Nano Computing. DEI is one of the few Institutes in the world which has introduced such courses even at the Undergraduate level, a fact that was appreciated even by Dr. Lov Grover, the famous originator of the Grover's algorithm who was the US PI of SQUAN 2007. The benefits of SQUAN 2007 in terms of furthering bilateral cooperation between India and the US were immense. Several researchers at DEI as well as other participants forged ties with American campuses by visits or sabbaticals to institutions in the US. The Convener of SQUAN 2007 visited the US PI for collaborative research and among other partnerships pursued were Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and University of Waterloo.