USS is proud to bring you Professor Lai Choy Heng. The details of his talk are as follows:

Date: Thursday, 14 September 2006
Time: 6 pm - 8 pm
Venue: USP Conference Room (Level 7, Blk ADM)

The following are useful references to start with:

a) A-L Barabasi, "Linked - The New Science of Networks", Perseus Publishing, Cambridge, Mass. 2002
b) M Buchanan, "Small World - Uncovering Nature's Hidden Networks", Weidenfeld & Nicholson, London.
c) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_network
d) Strogatz S. H. Exploring complex networks. Nature 410, 268-276 (2001).

About the speaker:

C H Lai studied at The University of Chicago for both his undergraduate and graduate degrees. His PhD thesis research was in weak interactions phenomenology, carried out at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, Batavia, Illinois, under the supervision of Chris Quigg.

He then spent two years at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, learning the new tricks in perturbative QCD calculations and experiencing Danish beersand May Day rallies.

Since then he has been back to this part of the world, first as a lecturer in the Department of Mathematics, then lecturer, senior lecturer, associate professor and professor in the Department of Physics, the National University of Singapore. Somewhere in between the years, he was part of the efforts in establishing computational science on campus, and gently moulded the developments of nonlinear dynamics and quantum information science in the Physics Department here.

Between 1994 and 1997, he was the Chairman of the Computational Science Program, and later the first Head of the Department of Computational Science. He was also a Vice-Dean in the Faculty of Science, taking care of various research activities and coordination, as well as the graduate study matters during 1996-2000. He held the position as the Dean of the Faculty of Science from July 2000 until June 2003. Currently, he is Vice-Provost (Academic Personnel) of the National University of Singapore.

His current research interests are a far cry from his graduate and postdoc days -- in fact he has given up particle phenomenology and field theory altogether (well, almost). In the last few years, he has been dabbling in chaotic dynamics and complex system, and occasionally some fundamental questions in theoretical physics. More focused attention is being paid at this time to the

• synchronization and control of chaos and applications in secure communication;
• quantum chaos, its characterization, semiclassical analysis/computation, and applications in mesoscopic quantum structures

• information: definition, processing and computation at the quantum level; quantum information technology

• complex systems: complex networks, pattern formation and self-organization, applications

He is currently the principal investigator of a project on complex network analysis with the Temasek Laboratories, and a member of NUS Quantum Information Science and Technology group in the Physics Department.

For further information, please contact: Winah's or Tel: 6516 4425.