Scores of eminent scientists from India and the US discussed several key issues in the field of nano computing at the Indo-US Shared Vision Workshop on soft, quantum and nano computing being held here.

The workshop, held at the Dayalbagh Educational Institute, began Friday with a talk by Nikhil Ranjan Pal, professor at the Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata. He spoke on 'Fuzzy Rule Based Systems: Applications, Design Issues, Solutions and Open Problems: Where do we stand?'.

Pal, an authority in the area of Fuzzy Systems, is a Fellow at the prestigious Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), US, and the Indian National Academy of Engineering. He is currently a visiting fellow in Taiwan as well.

He stressed how effective the tool of Fuzzy Logic was in a variety of applications ranging from satellite image processing to medical image processing for the detection of cancer in the young. While covering a wide range of issues in the field, he also explained them with great lucidity.

G. Ramnath, professor at the Rennsselaer Polytechnic Institute, US, talked on 'Transmuting Nanostructures for Nanocomputing Technologies'.

The world of computing is set to be revolutionized with nano devices (nano = 10-9 m) wherein a few atoms would be manipulated to do computational functions to produce powerful computers that would make the computers of today appear pedestrian in comparison.

Ramnath detailed the work being done by developing carbon nanotube architectures to produce nanodevice architectures of the future.

'Towards understanding the origin of genetic languages' was the topic of Apoorva Patel, professor at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore.

Lov K. Grover of Bell Labs, US, who chaired the session, said that Patel had made the presentation at his institute earlier and had been rated as one of the five most important talks ever given at Bell Labs.

In his talk, Patel explained how nature processes information in creating species with the lowest amount of information processing in the most optimal manner.

He provided pointers for answering the most complicated questions like 'How did I come into being?', 'How does nature evolve life?' and 'What is Life?'.

Bringing together difficult concepts from Biology and Computer Science, Patel gave very convincing answers to some of these difficult questions on life.

V. Ravi Shankar, professor at IIT Kanpur, R. Srikanth of the Raman Research Institute, Bangalore, S.P. Pal of IIT Kharagpur and Venu G. Achanta of Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) also gave enlightening lectures on various aspects of Quantum Computing.

Ravi Kothari of IBM India made a presentation on 'How Difficult Is This Classification Task?'.

Subscribe to daily press alerts via email »