Physics: Noble Prize vs. Milner Prize?

It has always been contentious when no more than three people share a Noble prize for invention or discovery.  And the further requirement of the associated validation.  Enter Mr. Yuri Milner, successful entrepreneur.  Mr. Milner has created one or more annual prizes of $3 million for the most influential thinker in fundamental physics.

From The Economist:

"Crucially, recipients earn the prize for inspired contributions that have yet to be experimentally verified, a tactic the Nobel committee eschews. If these later prove beautiful but wrong, so be it. The principle, Mr Milner explains, is to afford the world’s best brains the financial freedom to pursue fundamental ideas wherever these take them. It may have the added benefit of keeping some imaginative physicists away from Wall Street."

Read details here.

Innovation through Corporate and Academic Engagement

Measuring innovation ROI when corporations work with academia can sometimes be difficult. While one is driven to provide revenue generating results measured on a quarter to quarter basis, the other has goals of pedagogy and scholarship.

Here is an example of a success between Boeing and University of Washington on the 787:

"The key innovation that the UW center supported was a way to make “compression molded” parts from carbon fiber composites for small parts. The method was far cheaper than the regular process of layering long carbon fibers used for air frame components such as hull and wing."

Details here.

Communities Of Choice - The Avenue For 21st Century Breakthroughs

I have written consistently and proven the point that there is a myth called wisdom of the crowds. Perhaps it is a marketing term now engulfing the tera-intellect.


An excellent example in the Wired magazine article "There's Power In The Puzzle" here, highlights yet again how the power of communities formed by choice can drive breakthroughs past the imagination of the initiators of the idea for the community. The article discusses a SETI@home like program yet driven from a gamer's perspective, i.e. putting the people in the center of the process. The result is a game called Foldit -

"It simply serves up a multicolored knot of spirals and clumps—a 3-D render of a protein. Players use the cursor to grab, bend, pull, and wiggle the chain of amino acids anywhere along its length, folding the protein into its optimum shape. The only rules are based on physics—opposite charges attract, atomic bonds have limited angles of rotation, and the parts of the molecule that stick to water tend to point outward. The closer your model's properties adhere to those rules, the more points you get."

Yet, the important part of this activity was:

"Working on test proteins for which Baker already knew the structures, folders quickly started to make friends via the in-game chat channel. They shared insights and half-finished puzzles; teams emerged, and collective efforts proved far more successful than any solo folder. A member of the leading team named Jason Kuznicki ... set up a wiki that Popović adopted as Foldit's official manual. "We even built a mini-Facebook for them," he says."

I believe the 21st century is going to be about "communities of choice" driving breakthrough innovation. The internet will continue to flatten the intellectual landscape and making collaboration ubiquitous, where a student who has completed the MIT computer science course work through MIT's open-courseware in Vietnam's low socio-economic class (see excellent article here) can engage in direct scientific analysis with individuals independent of geography.

Note that the winner of the game of Foldit who developed a complex protein is a 13 year old.

China and Singapore Plan "Knowledge City"

Following the "Suzhou Industrial Park", "Tianjin Eco-City", the third large-scale cooperation project between China and Singapore - "Knowledge City" has been settled in the north district of Science Town in the Guangzhou Development Zone. Both sides have reached an agreement on the location of the project and will jointly carry out the project's feasibility study from April to Aug. The construction of the project is expected to begin in early 2010.

Update on American university campuses in the Gulf

George Mason University has a campus in the Emirate of Ras Al Khaimah in UAE that will be closing. See details here. Please note the comments to this article that provide good insights.

In comparison, the campus of Texas A&M setup in Qatar under the requirements of Qatar Foundation (see details here) continues to thrive. The Qatar Foundation loosely requires that the educational institutions setup should show direct value to Qatar and to its future growth.

Please see details on the other university campuses in Qatar here that include Virginia Commonwealth University, Carnegie Mellon University, Georgetown Uniersity and Northwestern University.

If this interests you, then you may want to look at the Qatar Science and Technology Park here.

World Perspective / Photo - 3 [India Institute of Technology]

Above is the picture of Hijli Dentention Camp at Kharagpur established during the British Colonial Rule in 1930 to accommodate those who were involved in the armed struggle for freedom of the Indian Sub-Continent or the non-cooperation movement.

On the same grounds of the infamous detention camp on the right is the picture of the first Prime Minister of India, Mr. Jawaharlal Nehru (see biography here), laying the foundation stone for the first of India Institute of Technologys (IIT) at Kharagpur.

At the ceremony on April 21st, 1956, Mr. Nehru said:

"Here I stand at this place and my mind inevitably goes back to that infamous institution for which this place became famous not now but 20 to 30 years ago- the Hijli detention camp. Here in the place of that Hijli detention camp stands this fine monument of India (IIT) today representing India's future in the making."

Read historical details of the Hijli Detention Camp and IIT Kharagpur here.

IIT Kharagpur today (see the University website here)  is ranked among the top Universities of the World and continues to gain ground in delivering the best in class talent.

[Below is the renovated detention camp serving as part of IIT]

As I post this blog I find it difficult to imagine the pride that the students and alumni of this institute must feel - to deliver and create knowledge through the passion and persistence of humans from the place of human misery created by humans. At the same time, I am confident that the experiences of these student's grand fathers and great grand fathers must reach deep within their hearts to kindle the desire to be the best that only the results we see in the World today can show. I will attempt to obtain a list of IIT Kharagpur alumni conducting the business of the World to post here in the near future.

The statement I make here is not that India has achieved such. The insight is for the astute - that if this has been achieved in such a short time then what is to come in a shorter time from South Asia?

Academic Capitalism

During my travels across the globe in the past ten years, I have noticed a larger presence of American Universities in the Gulf region. It is an interesting experience to be driving along the terminus of a distant nation 10,000 miles from home and out pops up George Mason University.

For me in today's ever flattening world, the last bastion of respect among nations and regions is the knowledge giver and knowledge creator. For academia, the two are intrinsically connected and are NOT mutually exclusive. A pure knowledge giver is a consulting company. A pure knowledge creator is a research and development facility. Universities are the roots of the tree on which the above two branches grow.

I will discuss my involvement in the business of knowledge in the upcoming blogs and place links here. For now, see this article from The New York Times reviewing the allure of money for the US academia to go overseas to the ongoing concerns and issues faced by the existing US universities overseas. (note: you may have to get a free log-in to NY Times first)