| Posted: February 25, 2007 |
India poised for breakthrough in nanotechnology |
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(Nanowerk News) The tree day Indo-US Shared Vision Workshop on Soft Quantum & Nano Computing (SQUAN-2007) workshop in Agra, India, came to a conclusion on Sunday. Indo-US collaboration in broadening the horizons of research in nano and quantum computing will open up new frontiers to speed up data transmission processes and unravel the mysteries of nature, said experts at a seminar here.
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The workshop is in the process of producing a shared vision document that will be submitted to the government and lay the foundation of a future partnership between the two countries in this vital sector.
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Richard Superfine, director, Center for Computer Integrated Systems for Microscopy and Manipulation, University of North Carolina, said: 'The advent of quantum and nano computing technologies has opened up a new dimension for the development of computers that will be more powerful and far more compact. Nanotechnology will eventually affect every industry and consumer in the world.'
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Lov K. Grover, scientist Bell Labs, also regarded as the father of quantum algorithms, said that India was poised for major breakthroughs considering the interest in research in these crucial sectors in universities and institutes here. Apart from speed, one significant advantage will be the exhaustive search methodologies.
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In terms of theoretical possibilities, it 'may be quite likely that the last frontier of science, that is transportation of physical objects including humans, may in the future become a reality', said Grover.
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The third day of SQUAN-2007 saw some of the most exciting talks by eminent personalities in the field of soft, quantum and nano computing in India and the US.
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The overviews presented by the experts were a window to the most recent and path-breaking developments in these fields in which every day witnesses some new result that takes us closer to realizing the vision of atomic and nano scale computing which would place at our disposal immense computational power that seems improbable today.
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Umesh Vazirani, a professor from the University of California, Berkley, talked about the future of quantum computing and gave a detailed account of the merits and demerits of the recent claims by D-Wave company in Canada which said it had succeeded in building a 16 Qubit quantum computer. He also answered questions about where India stands in building quantum computers and about our future prospects.
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Next came a Vision Talk on nanomachines by Superfine, who discussed work involving the development of nanoscale machines, measurement and manipulation systems. An excellent piece of work on the development of a virtual lung based on these technologies was discussed in detail. The complexity of biological systems like our lungs can only be understood when we try to build them ourselves. Even using the best possible technology we have, we still fall short of what nature has given us.
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Kalyanmoy Deb, a professor from the Indian Institute of Technology-Kanpur - spoke about "Evolutionary Computation for Practical Optimization". Deb has won several national and international awards including the prestigious Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Award in 2005. He gave a presentation on the latest trends in the field of evolutionary algorithms.
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