We need #trainTraining to build a long term #habit necessary to slash #pollution with climate changing #emissions.

Some people point out that trains still may have dirty emissions.
Here some reasons how going from #Warsaw to #Barcelona and back by train has been meaningful #now:

- 4 weeks of 2 #researchMeetings #benasque and #qtd23 gave me around 25 new contacts and had a lower #networking output per week than interpolating by train between these two destinations which resulted in 25 contacts gained in 2 weeks (#Cracow, #Vienna, #Innsbruck, #Milan, #Lyon, #Lausanne, #Zurrich, #Berlin).

- I was optimising meeting scientists outside of my bubble and find that encounters at thematic conferences tend to be less creative.

- If you fly, you fly in and out. By train you stay longer at a given institute, might travel through a node with a colleague etc. You give yourself a chance to experience more. That is the point of a #researchTravel and is better facilitated by train.

- I recommend to interpolate with up to 6 hour nodes to mitigate delays, departing after the uni visit. This pushed me to find productive stops. I dared to write to intimidatingly strong researchers and it worked.

- I talked to group members I didn't anticipate because I had a rhythm of travel and not just rushing back home. Train stations are centrally located so less hassle getting to the institutes than from airports outside of the city.

- I could double up meetings on the way back that were particularly productive on the way. Neither would happen by plane.

- I had more flexibility than when flying.

- On trains my mind could work, on a plane I waste time.

(1/more): e.g. saying city hopping opens doors😄, #interrail 🤙etc. 🫰

Here's an #introduction of @frederikhahn as part of my agenda that #nice should be a characteristic demanded of academics.

In the past few years Freddy has been gently cracking his head on how to remove bottlenecks in a #quantumNetwork. He focused on relevant #quantum states and tweaked their parts like he tweaks parts in his bike to make it run seamlessly
https://arxiv.org/abs/1805.04559
(Local complementations interest me for #quantumCompiling: the unitary encoding the repetition code can be turned into a gate between any two qubits because one can distill Bell pairs out of #GHZ states.)

Rick came from Berlin to the #quantumInformation #workshop in #benasque by train. His tap water canister was half empty: he realized that meh whatev he can travel half Europe and not eat if the food is not what he wants provided he has water to last him even more than 24 hs.

Frederik is a scientist who leads by example, is sustainably concerned about the #climateCrisis but look at him shining. His #intermittentFasting skills allowed him to be chilled after a strainous long distance travel but I learn from him that being nice and chilled is a muscle we can all train.

His integrity at work reminds me that it's not impossible to keep our humanity first and also excell at research. I wish we had an equivalent of #citationMetrics for acts of kindness in academia.

These photos were taken on a Friday, on Monday that week he defended his thesis. In style, which is his style. For his #phd hat I'd add a phone charger, his daily cycling suffices to top up the battery. I don't know how to symbolize my thanks for having made my local science world wholesome, one #introvert thought at a time, but: thank you for caring, Dr Hahn!

Overheard in #benasque: a renowned professor started a discussion by presenting their badge which made the student feel offended because they felt invalidated as if they weren't competent enough to know who that is.

"...and then showed me the badge...", "...pfff, like I don't know who that is..."

My point for paraphrasing the actual situation: presenting your badge visibly is a good practice.

Actually the student was 'outraged' more about the gap between the encountered humility which contrasts with the usual vibe. Presenting the badge can boost inclusivity.

For people who's fame precedes them, it's hard to not let the interaction dynamics be hijacked by presumptions of there being a separation as opposed to connection.

We all know this situation where we dare to discuss with someone seeming a giant because of some awesome paper and the conclusion of the chat is more "hey they're nice". But then we wasted the opportunity to focus on merit because of our own belief leading to insecurity and hesitation. Both sides can be aware of this happening.

For context, many renowned people in #science end up projecting an aura that people should be aware of who they are. When I overheard it, it's been a first for me too to hear about somebody known for their foundational contributions to show their badge instead.

#Conference badges have their useful role for building new connections.

Just in case you want the information, here's an entangled two qutrit state with a positive partial transpose
https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/9703004

Adrián Pérez-Salinas coordinated a #benasque session on variational #quantum algorithms.

People say various things about the state of the field, here's what I say:
From the beginning it was clear that there will be trainability issues, you can verify that it has been clear to me because I haven't written a single paper involving brute force training of circuits.

But.

While, on purpose, I haven't read a single paper on VQAs (until I needed to cite variational diagonalization to compare to my own proposal for diagonalization on quantum computers) and now that the field has reached a milestone, without having been involved, here's a few things I really like.

I claim it will matter down the line that:
- statements about barren plateaus are quantitative
- appearance of barren plateaus is implied by t-designs properties https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.02138
- plateaus are a result of dimensionality of the training parameter set.

To paraphrase grandmaster Bronstein, it's not about what but how.
We now know very, very well how VQAs go wrong. Early on it was only clear what the problem will be.

Each of the points above can guide better #ansatzae:
- they need to operate on clumped circuits to reduce the dimensionality
- they shouldn't rotate back and forth but use physics equations to guide the quantum compiling
- a restricted ansatz with justified expressibility can be quantitatively tested using the average+variance criteria of regular barren plateaus.

What the field achieved is to inform a large group of people how to recognize what a good variational Ansatz will be once we will encounter it. And that it will not be naive? Come on, easy would have been boring.

3 week workshop in #benasque. I realized I have fairly actionable projects that I didn't touch for 5 years as per modification date. Weird but kind of what a retreat in the mountains might bring about.

@deilann
Bouncing back on the subject, I took Artin's #GaloisTheory with me to #Benasque and I think on page 25 there is a complete discussion. As you said any #algebraicNumber, defined as a root of a real polynomial, can be seen as a root of a unique polynomial of lowest degree which is irreducible, i.e. not divisible by any other poly omial with coefficients in the base field.

The coefficient of the highest power needs to be 1, one should divide the contending polynomials by each other and evaluate at the shared root showing that, having the same degree, they have 0 polynomial ring division remainder so must be the same.

#Earthquake (#terremoto) M1.6 strikes 23 km W of #Benasque (#Spain) 15 min ago. More info: https://www.emsc-csem.org/Earthquake/earthquake.php?id=1277549

Max Lock is curating equilibration sessions in #benasque. I spoke about 1d rubidium experiments in Vienna.

The analog aspect of the quantum simulator allows to substantiate why the observations carry weight despite the technical challenges we face to get a good handle, i.e. see what's going on in the system.

https://slides.com/marekgluza/mechanisms_for_the_emergence_of_gaussian_correlations

@markusheinrich explained #math to me in #benasque how the twirl over a real adjoint representation instead of a complex one plays out in relation to #SchursLemma. The #commutatant needs to be a #divisionRing and there's only one over the complex numbers, the complex numbers. Over real numbers there are two more possibilities, real numbers and quaternions. Something called the Frobenius indicator is a way to know what will be the #rank of the projector appearing in the result of the twirl for a given #irrep.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.12223

I'm city hopping from Warsaw to #Benasque and yesterday I met Oli Reardon-Smith, here a paper with Hakop, Kamil and Stephen
https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.12223
I learned about an innovation in that they use part of samples to estimate certain parameters needed for a large deviation bound. It's like Hoefding's inequality on wheels.

I know of the BCa (biased corrected accelerated) bootstrap method for assigning confidence intervals to statistical estimations. Here a round of resampling is used to estimate two parameters to correct bias and accelerate sample efficiency in pinning down the accurate confidence interval.

What are other methods where you sample to get information about what to sample subsequently?

From a nice walk today in #cerler (Valle de #benasque )

Bioma de Benasque. Musgo (Bryophyta) (Spray sobre fotografía. Película Ilford HP5) Mas información en el link: https://www.tonocarbajo.net/la-naturaleza-es-el-museo ______________________ #biomas #colapse #hermetic #microplanet #microworld #tonocarbajo #experiment #biology #closedworlds #benasque #pirineo #ilfordhp5 #wood #forest #macrophotography #nikonfm2n #nikon

Photos from a bike ride yesterday to Valle de Estós, in #benasque . Very little snow for what’s common at this time of the year😕 other years it would have been impossible to ride there until May. Photos were taken at around 1800 meters above sea level, but those peaks are above 2000

Jam session in Molly Malone’s #benasque

Start of the big snow storm, supposed to leave half a meter of snow👯‍♀️👯‍♀️👯‍♀️⛷️⛷️⛷️#benasque #cerler

First big snow fall of the season #benasque #cerler

The lake and #cerler ski resort from Guayente sanctuary #benasque