Stefanovic,
Moore receive NSF grants
By Michael
Padilla
Two UNM
computer science professors received nearly $500,000 in funding
from the National Science Foundation (NSF) QuBiC (Quantum and
Biologically Inspired Computing) group.
Darko Stefanovic,
assistant professor in computer science, received $300,365 and
Cris Moore, assistant professor in computer science and physics
and astronomy, received $195,000.
Stefanovic
is working with Milan Stojanovic, Columbia University, on a
project in molecular computing. Stefanovic said molecular computing
offers the ability to do computation at the cellular level,
and creates nanotechnologies ranging from ultradense memory
to intracellular devices to diagnose and treat disease.
Stefanovic
said the authors of this proposal have found and experimentally
verified a new form of molecular computing, deoxribozyme
logic, that offers much greater scalability and robustness than
previous forms of DNA computing.
Already
we have succeeded in building simple computational devices and
testing them in the laboratory, Stefanovic said. But,
scaling these devices up presents massive combinatorial problems.
Stefanovic
said years from now the general public will benefit from medical
techniques in which decision-making a form of computation
to make diagnostic decisions, occur in each cell instead of
in the laboratory. Eventually this can be extended to
therapeutic decisions and actions as well, he said.
Moores
project is in collaboration with Alexander Russell at the University
of Connecticut. The project, totaling $370,000, combines approaches
from physics, mathematics and computer science to better understand
quantum computation.
Moore said
the main tool in the project is to use Fourier analysis, a mathematical
technique that breaks functions down according to how they oscillate.
Moore said
that Peter Shor of AT&T demonstrated in 1995 that quantum
computers can factor large numbers quicker than classical computers
can.
This
means that quantum computers could break most forms of public-key
encryption currently in use, Moore said. Our holy
grail is to solve another problem which is believed to
be very hard for classical computers, Graph Isomorphism. This
problem asks whether one large mathematical structure is actually
just a scrambled version of another.
Both
projects explore radically new ways to do computing...
Moore said. At some point our current computing technologies
will reach the limit of how fast and how small we can make them,
and ...it will be essential to look at fundamentally new technologies.