Dr. Bono

Sir Paul David Hewson was at Keio's Mita Campus today, picking up an honorary doctorate for his humanitarian work. He is in town for the TICAD IV conference on African development.

I caught only a few minutes of his talk, but he talked about the new ONE Campaign and about bringing it to Japan. He singled out Tadao Ando and a couple of others by name as artists with a conscience whom he admires. He also talked about how wonderful the young Japanese people are, humble and wanting to help the world (he must have been talking to SFC students :-).

Bono is smart, dedicated, inspired, and inspiring. With leadership like him, and enough inspired young people, we can make the world a better place.

Rikei Banare

Presented without comment, for the moment.

Japan is running out of engineers.

Recruiting Students

At our campus, Ph.D. students are admitted twice a year -- to start in September or in April. Although the official title is the "Graduate School of Media and Governance", we have many high-quality students (and faculty!) working in a wide variety of technical areas, some of which are showcased in the fall each year. There is spectacular work on electric vehicles, bacterial computing, smart fabrics, ubiquitous computing, and on and on.

The Internet Research Lab, of which I'm a part, does a variety of things, including iCar, mobile systems, SOI, and more.

I supervise or co-supervise students in those areas, but I especially focus on:

• Distributed Quantum Computing Systems (Japanese or English)
  
  
  
  • Architectures for quantum multicomputers
  
  
  • Quantum repeaters (physical simulation and especially network protocols and network architectures)
  
  
  • Quantum arithmetic
  
  
  • Entangled Quantum Internet
  
  
  • Quantum computer design tools
  
  
  
  
• All-IP Computer Architecture
  
  
  
  • iSCSI
  
  
  • USB/IP
  
  
  • Caching in wide-area computer systems
  
  
  • IP-based system bus architectures
  
  
  • Security and resource management
  
  
  • Human-centric dynamic system architectures
  
  
  
  

At SFC, recruiting of Ph.D. students is done very carefully, and in a very personal fashion. Prospective students are expected to find a faculty member they wish to work with and discuss possible research plans before completing the application process.

It's already very late to be starting that process if you are interested in starting this September; the application deadline is in just a week or so. But if you, or a student or acquaintance of yours, is interested in studying almost any networking-related topic, or quantum computing systems, drop me a line and let me know.

ASPLOS 2009

The ASPLOS 2009 CFP is out! Full papers due Aug. 7, 2008, conference Mar. 7-11, 2009, in Washington, DC.

Quantum Repeaters in ToN

A few hours ago, I received word that our paper System Design for a Long-Line Quantum Repeater has been accepted to IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, which, it could be argued, is the second-most influential venue in the computer networking community. I have updated arXiv:0705.4128v2 [quant-ph] with a paper that closely matches the accepted version.

Ostensibly, the paper presents some simulation results on cavity QED repeaters using our banded purification algorithm for scheduling purification operations. In the bigger picture, I think it points out the importance of scheduling (we picked up a factor of fifty over our prior results) as separate from the actual choice of physical operations for purification. It also provides, to the best of my knowledge, the first attempt to organize the behavior of repeater networks into protocol levels and divisions of responsibility, in the fashion that networking people are accustomed to.