About 80 elite undergraduates from top mainland Chinese, Hong Kong, Taiwanese, and Indian universities attended a winter school organized by the Institute of Theoretical Computer Science and Communications (ITCSC) from 21 to 25 January.
The programme explored the wonders of theoretical computer science, a field that deals with the nature of computation. It also covered topics in theoretical communication and networking problems including information theory and cryptography.
The lectures were given by Prof. Andrew Yao Chi-chih, Distinguished Professor-at-Large of CUHK and director of ITCSC, and other notable CUHK engineering professors, including chair professors Li Duan, Lee Tong, Xu Lei and Raymond Yeung. Prof. Bruce Hajek, renowned scholar from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, was also invited to give a lecture.
‘The purpose of the winter school is to enable students to see the “possibilities” in theoretical computing. If successfully developed, quantum computers would set off another scientific revolution. They can solve problems that currently require billions of years of computing time. Most encryption methods now rely heavily on their complexity of computation, therefore whether they be banking transactions or military secrets, will be cracked by quantum computers easily,’ Prof. Yao added.
Prof. Chiu Dah-ming, associate director of ITCSC said, ‘The school emphasizes breadth of knowledge. In a regular university course, students are given lectures by a professor on a topic. We have 18 professors giving one-hour lectures on different topics. This allows students to sample many exciting topics from different perspectives and from different professors. It is more like a conference or workshop than a traditional course. This is quite a new experience especially for Asian students.’
The winter school is the first event held by ITCSC, and a series of academic conferences and seminars will be held in the near future.
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