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A. M. Despain -

Professor Despain is the Powell Professor of Computer Engineering at USC and a Professor in the Computer Science and Electrical Engineering Systems Departments. He received his BS (1960), MS (1962), and Ph.D. (1966) degrees in Electrical Engineering from The University of Utah. He has been an assistant research professor at The University of Utah, an associate professor at Utah State University, a visiting associate professor at Stanford University, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley and has been at USC since 1989. Despain is a pioneer in the study of high performance computer systems for calculations. His research group builds experimental software and hardware systems including compilers, custom VLSI processors, and multiprocessor systems. The goal is to determine principles for the design of high performance computer systems. Despain's research interests include computer architecture, multiprocessor and multicomputer systems, logic programming, and design automation.
Despain Group Home Page.

Professor Lloyd's work focuses on the physics of information. He has contributed to the understanding of reversible computation and its implications for statistical mechanics. In the area of complex systems he has identified information-based measures of complexity and related systems' information-processing ability to their thermodynamic efficiency. He was the first to show that a variety of quantum systems possess the capacity for quantum information processing. He recently proved Feynman's 1982 conjecture that quantum computers are universal simulators for quantum systems in general.

Professor Kimble’s general area of activity is the quantum dynamics of open systems, including quantum measurement and computation, cavity quantum electrodynamics, and the quantum-classical interface. His principal scientific achievements include the first observation of a manifestly quantum or nonclassical state of the electromagnetic field and the first measurements in science with sensitivity beyond the Standard Quantum Limit (SQL). In the area of cavity quantum electrodynamics, he and his colleagues have achieved conditions of strong coupling of a single atom to an optical cavity and have exploited this capability for the first observations of photon antibunching in cavity QED and of the vacuum-Rabi splitting for a single atom in a cavity. Currently his group is exploring quantum logic in cavity QED, and has made the first demonstration of conditional dynamics at the single photon level
Professor Kimble was awarded the Max Born Award of the Optical Society of America, October 22, 1996, Rochester, NY.
Kimble Group Home Page.

Professor Koonin has extensive experience in the simulation of quantum systems using high performance computers. Among his scientific achievements relevant to the present proposal are the first numerical implementation of Time Dependent Hartree Fock calculations, which track the evolution of quantum wavefunctions to describe nuclear and atomic dynamics. More recently, his group has developed novel Monte Carlo methods for treating the nuclear many-body problem. Their realization on massively parallel computers has produced many new insights into nuclear structure. Professor Koonin is the author or coauthor of more than 150 papers applying quantum mechanics to condensed matter, atomic, nuclear, and elementary particle systems. He is also the author of a widely used textbook, Computational Physics.

Professor Preskill's primary research activities are in the theory of elementary particles, gravitation, and cosmology. His achievements include: pioneering the study of how phase transitions impact the evolution of the early universe, proposing that the mass of the universe is dominated by "cold dark matter," predicting the values of fundamental constants using quantum cosmology, formulating the theory of nonabelian quantum statistics, and showing that the black hole information paradox cannot be resolved within conventional quantum field theory. He (with his students) has recently performed a thorough analysis of the space/time requirements for factoring large numbers on a quantum computer.
John Preskill's Home Page
Preskill Group Home Page.