There
are revolutions at hand in the way we understand an
implement computation, driven by an awareness of impending
barriers to VLSI scaling and new understandings of the
physical world. This fundamental shift in perspective
allows us to contemplate engineering computational substrates
at the molecular and atomic levels. To develop and exploit
these new substrates will require an intimate understanding
of both the physical substrates and the nature of computation,
as well as the relation between them. Research and researchers
whose competencies span across the disciplines will
be necessary to drive progress in this area of novel
computational substrates...
...Thus
the read the opening paragraph of the announcement
for the Computing Beyond Silicon Summer School (CBSSS).
Coordinated by André DeHon, assistant professor
of computer science, and Erik Winfree (PhD '98), assistant
professor of computer science and computation and
neural systems, the program brought together leading
research faculty and 45 outstanding undergraduate
and graduate students from many disciplines and institutions
across the country (including Caltech). Part boot
camp, part pleasure cruise, CBSSS served as an intensive
four-week introduction to the emerging fields of molecular,
biomolecular, and quantum computing. Lectures, reading
assignments, and a paper and presentation project
kept the students active. In between all this, students
seized the opportunity to hang out with the guest
lecturers, Caltech faculty, and each other. They came,
they learned, they met future collaborators—and
they had fun. A potent combination. And of course,
ditto for the faculty and guest lecturers... As a
prototype of ISTI's outreach program of summer schools,
CBSSS's unique collection of people and ideas in one
place at one time points to the future of Caltech
as a hotbed of research in novel computational substrates.
For
more information on who was there and what they did,
go to http://www.cs.caltech.edu/cbsss
The
CBS3 students gracefully posed for "mug
shots" for posterity (see left). To engage the
students beyond the lectures, the CBS3 faculty
asked them to self-organize into small project teams
to expand on issues related to or motivated by the subject
matter presented in lectures. The students had roughly
three weeks to focus in on a topic and put together
a brief report. See http://www.cs.caltech.edu/cbsss/report1.html
for the resulting collection of student reports. Almost
none of the students were "experts" in the
issues they studied when they entered the program. Nonetheless,
these reports show that the multidisciplinary teams
assembled were able to dig deeply into a number of interesting
problems and point out some promising directions for
further inquiry.
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