Contact: Cris Moore, 920-3444 Darko Stefanovic, 277-6927 Media Contact: Michael Padilla

November 18, 2002 Two UNM computer science professors receive NSF QuBiC grants Two University of New Mexico 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 individually instead of in the laboratory. “Eventually this can be extended to therapeutic decisions and actions as well,” he said. Moore’s 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, which is a mathematical technique that breaks functions down according to how they oscillate. Moore said that Peter Shor of AT&T showed in 1995 that quantum computers can factor large numbers much more quickly 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. By doing non-Abelian Fourier analysis over the group of all possible scramblings, a quantum computer may be able to solve this problem the same way that Shor’s algorithm allows it to factor large numbers. “Both of these projects explore radically new ways to do computing — going beyond the computers we have now to quantum and nanotechnological devices,” Moore said. “At some point our current computing technologies will reach the limit of how fast and how small we can make them, and at that point it will be essential to look at fundamentally new technologies.” ###

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