Shtetl-Optimized

Last week I was in Vancouver, to give talks at the University of British Columbia and at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting.  As part of that visit, on Friday afternoon, John Preskill, John Martinis, Michael Freedman and I accepted a gracious invitation to tour the headquarters of D-Wave Systems in Burnaby (a suburb of Vancouver).  We started out in a conference room, where they served us cookies and sodas.  Being the mature person that I am, the possibility of the cookies being poisoned at no point crossed my mind.

Then we started the tour of D-Wave’s labs.  We looked under a microscope at the superconducting chips; we saw the cooling systems used to get the chips down to 20 millikelvin.  In an experience that harked back to the mainframe era, we actually walked inside the giant black cubes that D-Wave was preparing for shipment.  (The machines are so large partly because of the need for cooling, and partly to let engineers go in and fix things.)  Afterwards, D-Wave CTO Geordie Rose gave a 2-hour presentation about their latest experimental results.  Then we all went out to dinner.  The D-Wave folks were extremely cordial to us and fielded all of our questions.

In spite of my announcement almost a year ago that I was retiring as Chief D-Wave Skeptic, I thought it would be fitting to give Shtetl-Optimized readers an update on what I learned from this visit.  I’ll start with three factual points before moving on to larger issues.

Point #1: D-Wave now has a 128-(qu)bit machine that can output approximate solutions to a particular NP-hard minimization problem—namely, the problem of minimizing the energy of 90-100 Ising spins with pairwise interactions along a certain fixed graph (the “input” to the machine being the tunable interaction strengths).  So I hereby retire my notorious comment from 2007, about the 16-bit machine that D-Wave used for its Sudoku demonstration being no more computationally-useful than a roast-beef sandwich.  D-Wave does have something today that’s more computationally-useful than a roast-beef sandwich; the question is “merely” whether it’s ever more useful than your laptop.  Geordie presented graphs that showed D-Wave’s quantum annealer solving its Ising spin problem “faster” than classical simulated annealing and tabu search (where “faster” means ignoring the time for cooling the annealer down, which seemed fair to me).  Unfortunately, the data didn’t go up to large input sizes, while the data that did go up to large input sizes only compared against complete classical algorithms rather than heuristic ones.  (Of course, all this is leaving aside the large blowups that would likely be incurred in practice, from reducing practical optimization problems to D-Wave’s fixed Ising spin problem.)  In summary, while the observed speedup is certainly interesting, it remains unclear exactly what to make of it, and especially, whether or not quantum coherence is playing a role.

Which brings me to Point #2.  It remains true, as I’ve reiterated here for years, that we have no direct evidence that quantum coherence is playing a role in the observed speedup, or indeed that entanglement between qubits is ever present in the system.  (Note that, if there’s no entanglement, then it becomes extremely implausible that quantum coherence could be playing a role in a speedup.  For while separable-mixed-state quantum computers are not yet known to be efficiently simulable classically, we certainly don’t have any examples where they give a speedup.)  Last year, as reported on this blog, D-Wave had a nice Nature paper that reported quantum tunneling behavior in an 8-qubit system.  However, when I asked D-Wave scientist Mohammad Amin, he said he didn’t think that experiment provided any evidence for entanglement between qubits.

The “obvious” way to demonstrate entanglement between qubits would be to show a Bell inequality violation.  (We know that this can be done in superconducting qubits, as the Schoelkopf group at Yale among others reported it a couple years ago.)  Meanwhile, the “obvious” way to demonstrate a role for quantum coherence in the apparent speedup would be gradually to “turn down” the system’s coherence (for example, by adding an interaction that constantly measured the qubits in the computational basis), and check that the annealer’s performance degraded to that of classical simulated annealing.  Unfortunately, the D-Wave folks told us that neither experiment seems feasible with their current setup, basically because they don’t have arbitrary local unitary transformations and measurements available.  They said they want to try to demonstrate 2-qubit entanglement, but in the meantime, are open to other ideas for how to demonstrate a quantum role in the apparent speedup with their existing setup.

Point #3: D-Wave was finally able to clarify a conceptual point that had been bugging me for years.  I—and apparently many others!—thought D-Wave was claiming that their qubits decohere almost immediately (so that, in particular, entanglement would almost certainly never be present during the computation), but that the lack of entanglement didn’t matter, for some complicated reason having to do with energy gaps.  I was far from alone in regarding such a claim as incredible: as mentioned earlier, there’s no evidence that a quantum computer without entanglement can solve any problem asymptotically faster than a classical computer.  However, that isn’t D-Wave’s claim.  What they think is that their system decoheres almost immediately in the energy eigenbasis, but that it doesn’t decohere in the computational basis—so that, in particular, there would be entanglement at intermediate stages.  If so, that would be perfectly fine from the standpoint of the adiabatic algorithm, which doesn’t need coherence in the energy eigenbasis anyway (after all, the whole point is that, throughout the computation, you want to stay as close to the system’s ground state as possible!).  I understand that, given their knowledge of decoherence mechanisms, some physicists are extremely skeptical that you could have rapid decoherence in the energy basis without getting decoherence in the computational basis also.  So certainly the burden is on D-Wave to demonstrate that they maintain coherence “where it counts.”  But at least I now understand what they’re claiming, and how it would be compatible (if true) with a quantum speedup.

Let me now move on to three broader questions raised by the above points.

The first is: rather than constantly adding more qubits and issuing more hard-to-evaluate announcements, while leaving the scientific characterization of its devices in a state of limbo, why doesn’t D-Wave just focus all its efforts on demonstrating entanglement, or otherwise getting stronger evidence for a quantum role in the apparent speedup?  When I put this question to Mohammad Amin, he said that, if D-Wave had followed my suggestion, it would have published some interesting research papers and then gone out of business—since the fundraising pressure is always for more qubits and more dramatic announcements, not for clearer understanding of its systems.  So, let me try to get a message out to the pointy-haired bosses of the world: a single qubit that you understand is better than a thousand qubits that you don’t.  There’s a reason why academic quantum computing groups focus on pushing down decoherence and demonstrating entanglement in 2, 3, or 4 qubits: because that way, at least you know that the qubits are qubits!  Once you’ve shown that the foundation is solid, then you try to scale up.  So, please support D-Wave if it wants to spend money to show Bell inequality violations, or other “smoking-gun” evidence that its qubits are working together coherently.  You’re welcome, D-Wave!

The second question is one that I’ve encountered many times on the blogosphere: who cares how D-Wave’s system works, and whether it does or doesn’t exploit quantum coherence, as long as it solves practical problems faster?  Sure, maybe what D-Wave is building is really a series of interesting, useful, but still basically “classical” annealing devices.  Maybe the word “quantum” is functioning here as the stone in a stone soup: attracting money, interest, and talented people to build something that, while neat, ultimately doesn’t much depend on quantum mechanics at all.  As long as D-Wave’s (literal!) black box solves the problem instances in such-and-such amount of time, why does it matter what’s inside?

To see the obtuseness of this question, consider a simple thought experiment: suppose D-Wave were marketing a classical, special-purpose, $10-million computer designed to perform simulated annealing, for 90-bit Ising spin glass problems with a certain fixed topology, somewhat better than an off-the-shelf computing cluster.  Would there be even 5% of the public interest that there is now?  I think D-Wave itself would be the first to admit the answer is no.  Indeed, Geordie Rose spoke explicitly in his presentation about the compelling nature of (as he put it) “the quantum computing story,” and how it was key to attracting investment.  People don’t care about this stuff because they want to find the ground states of Ising spin systems a bit faster; they care because they want to know whether or not the human race has finally achieved a new form of computing.  So characterizing the device matters, goddammit!  I pride myself on being willing to adjust my opinions on just about anything in response to new data (as I’ve certainly done in D-Wave’s case), but the insistence that black boxes must be opened and explanations provided is something I’ll carry to the grave.

Finally, given the skeptical-yet-positive tone of this post, some people will wonder whether I now regret my earlier, more unmitigated D-Wave skepticism.  The answer is no!  Asking questions is my job.  I’ll give D-Wave credit whenever it answers some of the questions—as it did on this visit!—and will shift my views accordingly.  But I’ll also neither stop asking nor apologize for asking, until the evidence for a quantum speedup becomes clear and indisputable (as it certainly hasn’t yet).  On the other hand, I do regret the snowballing nastiness that developed as a combined result of my and other skeptics’ statements, D-Wave’s and its supporters’ statements, and the adversarial nature of the blogosphere.  For the first time, I find myself really, genuinely hoping—with all my heart—that D-Wave will succeed in proving that it can do some (not necessarily universal) form of scalable quantum computation.  For, if nothing else, such a success would prove to the world that my $100,000 is safe, and decisively refute the QC skeptics who, right now, are getting even further under my skin than the uncritical D-Wave boosters ever did.

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(Credit for most of the photos: Dana)

I was going to write a whole long essay about

• the differences between going to the zoo and visiting an ancestral environment of humanity, where elephants have grazed for millions of years;
• the weird sense of familiarity, as if you’re seeing how the surface of the earth is “supposed” to look, how it did look before humans started converting it into KFCs and parking lots;
• how to tell whether an elephant charging your jeep is serious about wanting to trample you or, much more likely, just warning you to go away (apparently, it has to do with whether its ears are straight back or flapping);
• the “airport” at Lake Naivasha (a strip of dirt in a grassy field filled with zebras, and a guy on a bicycle who shoos the zebras off the strip before a plane lands);
• Britain’s failure, to this day, to issue any sort of apology for its detention, torture, and murder of tens of thousands of Kenyans during the waning years of its colonial rule in the 1950s;
• the near-destruction by poaching, over the last century, of many of the majestic animal populations you see above;
• the heroism of Richard Leakey (past director of the Kenya Wildlife Service) in overcoming decades of bureaucratic inertia to initiate a crackdown, where rangers were authorized to “poach the poachers,” shooting them on sight (!);
• how, after Leakey almost-singlehandedly saved Kenya’s wild elephants, he lost both of his legs when his plane crashed (widely suspected to be due to sabotage), and was forced from his job months later;
• the benefits of safari tourism in creating a serious economic incentive for conservation, but also the drawbacks (e.g., all the jeeps making it harder for the cheetahs to hunt);
• the large, obvious, anything-but-“theoretical” changes being wrought by global warming on the rainfall in Kenya’s game parks (which changes are killing the trees, thereby eliminating the lions’ hiding places and making it harder for them to hunt—hey, at least the zebras are happy);
• the Maasais’ innovative uses for cow dung; the resulting immature jokes on my part (homeowner to roofer: “this roof you sold me is shit!”);
• my growing fascination, over the course of the trip, with the lesser-known corners of Mammalia (elands, dik-diks, kudus, waterbucks, topis, rock hyraxes); how this might mirror my fascination with lesser-known complexity classes like AWPP, QMA(2)/qpoly, SBP, C₌P, and BPP_path;
• how parts of the African savannah have better cellphone reception than my office in Stata;
• how it’s indeed possible to catch up on Jon Stewart and The Big Bang Theory over wifi, from a tent in the Maasai Mara, while hippos bellow loudly in the river below, and elephants graze and crocodiles sun themselves on the other side.

But then I never got around to writing that essay.  So enjoy the photos, and ask in the comments if you want me to say something else.

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Ho³!  Home with family for the holidays and looking for something to do?  Then check out the archives of our 6.893 Philosophy and Theoretical Computer Science course blog.  The course just ended last week, so you can find discussions of everything from the interpretation of quantum mechanics to Occam’s Razor to the Church-Turing Thesis to strong AI, as well as links to student projects, including Criticisms of the Turing Test and Why You Should Ignore (Most of) Them, Barwise Inverse Relation Principle, Bayesian Surprise, Boosting, and Other Things that Begin with the Letter B, and an interactive demonstration of interactive proofs.  Thanks to my TA Andy Drucker, and especially to the students, for making this such an interesting course.

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Lance Fortnow now has a post up about how wonderful Graham Spanier and Joe Paterno were, and how sorry he is to see them go.

For what it’s worth, I take an extremely different view.  I’d be thrilled to see the insane football culture at many American universities—the culture that Spanier and Paterno epitomized—brought down entirely, and some good might yet come of the Penn State tragedy if it helps that happen.  Football should be, as it is at MIT, one of many fine extracurricular activities that are available to interested students (alongside table tennis, glassblowing, robot-building…), rather than a primary reason for a university’s existence.

What’s interesting about the current scandal is precisely that it establishes some finite upper bound on what people will tolerate, and thereby illustrates just what it takes for the public to turn on its football heroes.  Certainly the destruction of academic standards doesn’t suffice (are you kidding?).  More interestingly, sexism, sexual harassment, and “ordinary” rape—offenses that have brought down countless male leaders in other fields—barely even make a dent in public consciousness where football stars are concerned.  With child rape, by contrast, one can actually find a non-negligible fraction of Americans who consider it comparable in gravity to football.  (Though, as the thousands of rioting Penn State students reminded us, that’s far from a universal opinion.)  Many commentators have already made the obvious comparisons to the Catholic Church’s abuse scandal, and the lesson for powerful institutions the world over is indeed a similar one: sure, imprison Galileo; by all means stay silent during the Holocaust; but don’t protect pedophiles—cross that line, and your otherwise all-forgiving constituents might finally turn on you.

I should say that both of my parents are Penn State grads, and they’re both disgusted right now with the culture of hooliganism there—a culture that was present even in the late 60s and early 70s, but that’s become much more dominant since.  To the many of you at Penn State who want a university that’s more than an adjunct to a literally-rapacious football program, you have this blog’s admiration and support as you struggle to reclaim your great institution.  Go for the touchdown—WOOOOO!

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I thought I’d let Shtetl-Optimized readers know about an experimental new course I’m teaching this fall (starting tomorrow): 6.893 Philosophy and Theoretical Computer Science.  The course was directly inspired by my Why Philosophers Should Care About Computational Complexity essay, and will cover many of the same topics.  Here’s the description:

This new offering will examine the relevance of modern theoretical computer science to traditional questions in philosophy, and conversely, what philosophy can contribute to theoretical computer science.  Topics include: the status of the Church-Turing Thesis and its modern polynomial-time variants; quantum computing and the interpretation of quantum mechanics; complexity aspects of the strong-AI and free-will debates; complexity aspects of Darwinian evolution; the claim that “computation is physical”; the analog/digital distinction in computer science and physics; Kolmogorov complexity and the foundations of probability; computational learning theory and the problem of induction; bounded rationality and common knowledge; new notions of proof (probabilistic, interactive, zero-knowledge, quantum) and the nature of mathematical knowledge.  Intended for graduate students and advanced undergraduates in computer science, philosophy, mathematics, and physics.  Participation and discussion are an essential part of the course.

If you’d like to follow remotely, the course homepage has links to lots of interesting readings, and students will also be posting their personal reactions to the class discussions as the semester progresses.

Update (Sept. 7): By overwhelming request not only from readers but from students in the class, and with several of those students’ extremely kind assistance, we will be making audio recordings—although the audio quality probably won’t be great.

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Here’s an interview with me by math grad student Samuel Hansen, as part of a podcast he runs called Strongly Connected Components.  (Also check out the interviews with Steven Rudich, Steven Rudich a second time, Lance Fortnow, Doron Zeilberger, and your other favorite stars of the nerdosphere!)  In the interview, I talk about my passion for baseball stats, what you don’t know about llama-breeding, the use of color in Matisse’s later works … oh all right, it’s mostly about quantum computing and P vs. NP.

Here’s a story I told for an event called Story Collider, which was back-to-back with a superb production of Breaking the Code (Hugh Whitemore’s acclaimed play about the life of Alan Turing) in Cambridge’s Central Square Theater.  I was honored to serve as a “scientific consultant” to the Breaking the Code production, and to do audience Q&A before and after a couple performances.  In the Story Collider, I talk about the “Turing phase” I went through as a teenager and Alan T.’s impact on my life.

(Note: For the past couple years, I’ve avoided talking much about my personal life on this blog, since I pride myself on being someone who learns from experience and adjusts his behavior accordingly.  But two months ago, something truly happy occurred in my life, and if you listen to the end of the Story Collider, you’ll find out what it was…)

One last personal note: I’m at the Federated Computing Research Conference in San Jose all week.  If you read Shtetl-Optimized, are here at FCRC, see me, and wouldn’t do so otherwise, come and say hi!

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The American Museum of Natural History has two temporary exhibits that are drawing large crowds.  One, Brain: The Inside Story, I can attest is worth a visit the next time you’re in NYC.  From the New York Times review, I’d been worried that the exhibit would be full of la-de-da generalities: “how marvelously complicated is the brain!  how little we understand about it!”  But it turned out that was just the review.   The exhibit itself does a pretty good job of summarizing what’s known about how the brain is organized, how it develops, how various drugs affect it, and more.  One highlight for me was a model brain that you can take apart to see how the brain stem, limbic system, and cerebral cortex fit together—something that 2D images had never successfully conveyed to me.  The other exhibit, The World’s Largest Dinosaurs, was sold out for the entire day when we tried to go there, so we had to content ourselves with the smaller dinosaurs in the rest of the museum.

The Mark Twain House and Museum in Hartford, Connecticut, should be avoided at all costs.  On a recent visit, I and my family of Twain fans were snidely turned away since we hadn’t booked a tour—a requirement buried in the website, which someone googling for the opening hours would almost certainly miss.  (This despite the fact that the museum wasn’t crowded, and we could have easily joined a tour that was starting as we arrived.)  So don’t suffer the petty bureaucrats who curate Twain’s legacy, and treat the town of Hartford the way they’d apparently like you to: as a bathroom stop along the highway from New York to Boston.  Twain would’ve been amused. Jeffrey Nichols, Executive Director of the Mark Twain House, left me a personal apology in comments section.  I thank him warmly for that, and maybe I will visit again sometime—though it will help if I have some way of knowing I won’t just be turned away again! 🙂

The Yad Vashem Holocaust History Museum in Jerusalem has been redesigned since the last time I was there, in 2002.  In the old Yad Vashem, you walked around more-or-less randomly looking at the exhibits; in the new one, you proceed in a more linear order (similar to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC): from the rise of Nazism to the first anti-Jewish laws to the ghettoes to the gas chambers and crematoria.  The tour ends powerfully, with the Hall of Names (a large circular room with photos of victims and bookshelves of data about 3.8 million of them), followed by a balcony with a spectacular view of West Jerusalem—as if the building itself is trying to explain why the country it’s in exists.  I recommend a visit, even if you’ve been to Yad Vashem before its redesign in 2005.  But be careful to check the opening hours: the first time my family and guests tried to visit, the museum was closing, we were turned away, and we ended up going instead to a rest stop full of Elvis statues, where people lined up to use the bathroom and bought Elvis t-shirts.  (I thought that belonged in some anthology of Jewish humor.)

Summary: While the world’s museums have a great deal to teach us, they ought to devote more of their attention to the fundamental tasks of being open and letting people in.  People turned away from a museum are not just lost customers: they’ve often spent hours getting to an unusual place, and may be so annoyed by the wasted trip that they won’t want to return, even if they have the opportunity to do so.  In two of the cases above, I checked the website beforehand and that didn’t suffice, since the key information I needed wasn’t there or was buried.  Yeah, I suppose I could call ahead before every museum visit, but I hate doing that.  If someone wants to start CanIActuallyGetInToTheMuseum.com, it could be a fantastic way to not make any money.

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Last night, the MIT Egyptian Club hosted a “What’s Going On In Egypt?” event, which included a lecture, a Q&A session with Egyptian students, Egyptian music, and free falafel and baklava.  I went, not least because of the falafel.

The announcement that Mubarak was leaving came just a few hours before the event, which was planned as a somber discussion but hastily reconfigured as a celebration.  As you’d imagine, the mood was ecstatic: some people came draped in Egyptian flags, and there was shouting, embracing, and even blowing of vuvuzelas.  Building E51 wasn’t quite Tahrir Square, but it was as close as I was going to get.

About 300 people showed up.  I’d expected an even bigger turnout—but then again, this was MIT, where the democratic awakening of the Arab world might have to wait if there’s a pset due next week.  Many of the people who came were speaking Arabic, greeting each other with “salaam aleykum.”  But only a minority were Egyptians: I met jubilant Syrians and Saudi Arabians, and pan-Arab pride was a major theme of the evening.

At one point, I overheard two guys speaking something that sounded like Arabic but wasn’t: “yesh khasa?  eyn?”  It was Hebrew, which I’m proud to say I now speak at almost the level of a 3-year-old.  The Israelis were debating whether there was lettuce in the falafel (there wasn’t).  Joining their conversation, I confirmed that we had come for basically the same reasons: first, to “witness” (insofar as one could without leaving campus) one of the great revolutions of our time; secondly, the falafel.

Two socialist organizations were selling newspapers, with headlines trumpeting the events in Egypt as the dawn of a long-awaited global workers’ revolt against capitalism.  Buying a $1 newspaper (and politely turning down a subscription), I thought to myself that one has to admire these folks’ persistence, if not their powers of analysis.

Finally the main event started.  An Egyptian student from Harvard presented a slideshow, which summarized both the events of the last three weeks and the outrages of the last 30 years that led to them (poverty, torture, suppression of opposition parties, indefinite detention without charges, arrests for things like having long hair).  He said that this uprising wasn’t anything like Iran’s 30 years ago, that it was non-Islamic and led by the pro-democracy Facebook generation.  Then there was half an hour for Q&A.

Someone asked about the protesters’ economic goals.  One student panelist started to answer, but then another interjected: “Look, the people in Tahrir Square just overthrew the government.  I don’t think they’ve had much time yet to think through their economic plan.”

Someone else asked about the role of the US.  A student answered that it was “complicated, to say the least,” and that the Obama administration seemed internally divided.

Perhaps the most interesting question was whether the students themselves planned to return to Egypt, to help build the new democratic society.  After a long silence, two students said yes.

No one asked about the future of Egypt/Israel relations, and the subject never came up.  But it seemed obvious that, if the students I saw were running Egypt, they’d be too busy modernizing their country’s economy to spend much time denouncing Zionist iniquities.

In general, I agree with Natan Sharansky that, for the US and Israel, it would be incredibly shortsighted to see only danger and “instability” in the Great Egyptian Twitter Revolt of 2011.  The variance is enormous, which makes it almost impossible to estimate the expectation, but there’s certainly large support on the positive half of the spectrum.

So, to my Egyptian readers: congratulations, best wishes, mazel tov, and mabrouk from the entire executive staff of Shtetl-Optimized.  May your revolution be remembered with those of 1776 and 1989 and not with those of 1917 and 1979.

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Three (pseudo-)random updates:

First, sadly, I’ll be going to neither ICS’2011 in Beijing nor QIP’2011 in Singapore this coming week—too much travel!   If you’re going to either conference and would like to contribute a guest post, please let me know.

Second, I posted a note to the arXiv this week called Impossibility of Succinct Quantum Proofs for Collision-Freeness.  Here’s the abstract:

We show that any quantum algorithm to decide whether a function f:[n]→[n] is a permutation or far from a permutation must make Ω(n^1/3/w) queries to f, even if the algorithm is given a w-qubit quantum witness in support of f being a permutation.  This implies that there exists an oracle A such that SZK^A⊄QMA^A, answering an eight-year-old open question of the author.  Indeed, we show that relative to some oracle, SZK is not in the counting class A₀PP defined by Vyalyi.  The proof is a fairly simple extension of the quantum lower bound for the collision problem.

This result is neither hard nor surprising, but it does more-or-less solve a problem that’s bothered me since grad school (and which I mentioned a couple months ago on this blog) in a ridiculously simple-in-retrospect way, which is either nice or disappointing depending on how you look at it.

Third, some of you might have heard that the Carmel region in Israel recently suffered a terrible forest fire, which destroyed about 30 million trees and killed 44 people, and which required the assistance of many countries to put out.  Yesterday, after giving a talk at the Technion in Haifa, I had a chance to tour some of the fire damage.  While we were on the hike, a torrential downpour started (which caught me without coat or umbrella)—if only the rain had come a few weeks earlier!  Anyway, here are some photos:

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Disclaimer: The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy has asked me to clarify that, although this post will contain a photograph of me standing near the President of the United States, nothing in the post, or in Shtetl-Optimized more generally, is endorsed in any way by the White House or the President.  You know, just in case you were wondering.

It’s a good thing that I chose a career in science rather than in public relations.

Within one century, government-sponsored scientific research radically changed the ways that human beings exist on this planet.  Electronics are possible because of the quantum revolution of the 1920s, a revolution that many of us are still trying to understand the full implications of.  While it benefited from a government monopoly, Bell Labs was able to invent and/or commercialize the transistor, the laser, the fiber-optic cable, and the communications satellite.  (As soon as Congress opened the telecom market to competitors, Bell Labs’ capacity to innovate was permanently crippled.)  Computers, the Internet, cell phones, nuclear energy, DNA testing, and widespread vaccination are a reality today largely because of a partnership between academic scientists and their governments, in the US and elsewhere, that started in earnest during World War II and has continued to the present.

I sort of imagined that, if you were reading this blog, then you knew all of that, and also knew that I knew it.  But I was mistaken.  In writing about what seemed to me like a slam-dunk issue for any thinking person—namely, protecting the 0.18% of the United States federal budget that goes to the National Science Foundation—I somehow managed to make enemies not only of the NSF’s opponents, who skewered me as an ivory-tower elitist, but also of many of its supporters, who either didn’t understand or didn’t appreciate my attempts at gallows humor.

Fortunately, today I have a happy story involving the NSF.  As Lance Fortnow kindly mentioned a month ago, I had the honor of being included in this year’s PECASE (Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers) class.  Here I followed in the footsteps of Adam Smith and Sean Hallgren, two theoretical computer scientists from Penn State (and very nice people) who won last year.  The PECASE is given for a combination of research and outreach, so there’s little doubt this blog played a role, in addition (I hope!) to the research and teaching that I sometimes do in my spare time.  There’s no money in the PECASE, just a fun trip to DC for ceremonies and a photo-op with the President.

The day (last Monday) started with a ceremony in the Department of Agriculture building. There was a Color Guard, then a beautiful live performance of the national anthem, then short speeches, then a presentation of awards that resembled a high-school graduation, then a reception where they served these really nice smoked-salmon wraps, as well as chocolate truffles that were on sticks like lollipops.  The awardees’ families were all there with us, but unfortunately, only the awardees themselves were cleared to enter the White House complex for the presidential photo-op.  There was no Air Force One pickup to get to the White House: we took the Metro.  We arrived at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, which is to the left of the White House, adjacent to the West Wing.  There were Christmas decorations all around.

After going through a security check, we were ushered into a room that seemed specially designed for presidential photo-ops.  It had staggered platforms for standing on, with curtains in the background.

I was allowed to bring my cellphone, but it didn’t work inside the White House.  There was a strict no-photography rule.

We were called to pose for the photo in order of height: people over 6ft in the back row, then people over 5ft 10in in the next two rows, etc.  I was lucky to be short enough to land a spot in the second-to-front row.  We stood there for about fifteen minutes while waiting for the President to arrive.

The organizer from the Office of Science and Technology Policy warned the women in the front row that last year, the President put his arm around them for the photo—so they should be prepared!

At 1:55pm, we received word that the President would arrive at 2:05pm, and at 2pm, we received word that he was on his way over.  Finally, at 2:05 on the dot, he bounded into the room and the PECASE awardees erupted into applause.  My MIT colleague Manolis Kellis bellowed “Mr. President!”, which made the President laugh.

The President looked and sounded pretty much the same as on TV.  I was happy to see that his lip looked fine.  He shook hands with everyone in the front row, assuring everyone else that they’d get a chance to shake his hand later as well.

(I’m the one wearing a tie with a little drawing of the MIT Stata Center on the bottom.)

The President spoke for about five minutes, while Secret Service agents stood unobtrusively in the corners of the room.  Here were his main points, as I remember them:

• He couldn’t be more proud of us.
• Science and technology are extremely important for the nation’s future.
• He’s been fighting for more science funding.  (At this, the PECASE awardees burst into applause again.)
• Science will be a highlight of his next State of the Union address.  (Hey, you read it here first.)
• He understands that the PECASE award is not just for research but also for outreach and education, which is great.
• As someone with two daughters, he’s especially happy to see so many female PECASE winners.
• He feels so honored to be able to pose for a photo with us.  (At this, everyone laughed.)
• He made a reference to “young people, which most of you still qualify as” (causing more laughter), and said he’s expecting us to “produce” and win some Nobel prizes.

As the rows cleared out, the President shook hands with everyone in turn.  A few people said Merry Christmas.  I just said “thank you,” and he said “thank you” back.  Then I quickly moved away, since I had a cold and was worried about giving it to him.  (Also, my hand was sweating for some reason—maybe because I was wearing a suit, which was definitely one of the more unusual aspects of the day for me!)

Immediately after the photo, we were escorted out of the Eisenhower Building.  (Apparently the PECASE awardees in some previous years got a tour of the White House, but we didn’t.)

Later in the afternoon, there was a reception at NSF headquarters for the 19 PECASE winners whose research was sponsored by NSF (the remaining 66 were sponsored by the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Energy, the Defense Department, NASA, or other agencies). After opening remarks by Subra Suresh, the new NSF director and previously Dean of Engineering at MIT, each of the awardees gave a 3-minute speech about his or her work. I really enjoyed listening to the other 18 talks (as for my own, I spoke too fast and probably lost people).

At the risk of annoying earnestness, I’d like to thank:

• My NSF program officer (and all-around favorite government official), Dmitri Maslov.
• Every reader of this blog who ever said anything positive (or at least non-negative) about it.
• The Office of Science and Technology Policy, for putting together an awesome day (and inducing me to wear a tie even though no one was being married, buried, or bar-mitzvahed).
• President Obama, for supporting science and education even in the face of determined opposition.
• My fellow American taxpayers, for bankrolling the NSF. May all who receive grants strive to be worthy of them.
• My family.

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