The American Council on Education (ACE) has selected UMBC’s Sarah Shin, professor of education and special assistant to the provost for academic initiatives, as a fellow in its 2017-18 class.

Each year the ACE Fellows program, the longest running leadership development program in the United States, names a select group of emerging college and university leaders to participate in its intensive program. Shin is one of just 46 emerging leaders in higher education selected nationwide this year.

“I am deeply grateful for the opportunity to participate in the ACE Fellows Program,” says Shin, thanking her nominator, Provost Philip Rous, whom she works with closely on programs and initiatives that support the university’s new strategic plan. Shin notes, “The ACE Fellows Program will help me be more effective in this work by offering me the opportunity to benefit from on-the-job experience and skills development that are condensed into a single year.”

The robust program combines retreats and visits to campuses and higher education-related organizations with placement at a host institution for a close mentoring experience with a university leader outside of the fellow’s home campus. Fellows observe and work closely with senior officers at their host institution, including the university president, and use those experiences to inform projects of pressing concern to their home institutions.

“I believe that the close mentoring, leadership seminars, campus visits, and frequent opportunities for networking that are the hallmarks of the ACE Fellows Program will be enormously valuable both to my own professional development and to UMBC,” Shin reflects. “I’m looking forward to a great year of learning and growth and bringing back important lessons to contribute to advancing the mission of UMBC.”

Dean Scott Casper, of UMBC’s College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences, wholeheartedly agrees. “I’m delighted for Sarah and for UMBC that she will join the ACE Fellows program,” he shares. “The opportunity to learn from another institution’s practice, as well as from colleagues around the country, will enrich not just Sarah but our entire community.”

In addition to being named an ACE Fellow, Shin recently received UMBC’s prestigious Presidential Research Faculty Award.

Photo: Sarah Shin, by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.

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A recent gift by Stanley B. Burns, M.D. substantially increases the holdings of daguerreotypes at UMBC. Dr. Burns, historian, collector, and physician, donated 252 daguerreotypes from his large photography collection, continuing his long relationship with UMBC.

Tom Beck, chief curator of UMBC’s Albin O. Kuhn Library notes that the donated works are both signed and unsigned daguerreotypes:

More than seventy different photographers are represented among the signed works, including recognized daguerreotypists such as Charles Deforest Fredericks, Rufus Anson, John Plumbe, Jr., Samuel Broadbent, and Jessie Whitehurst. The unsigned works are unattributable to any specific artist but hold significant value for the uniqueness of the imagery, the interesting representations of nineteenth century people, and the material culture characteristics.

Having acquired his first photograph in 1975 (a medical image), Burns founded the “Burns Archive” in 1977 at his New York City home. The Archive began receiving recognition in 1978 by such prominent publications as New York magazine, Aperture magazine, and the New York Times. Art& Antiques Magazine labeled Burns “one of America’s Top 100 Collectors.”

As an historian, Burns has written over 1,100 articles and over forty books on subjects ranging from Victorian funeral portraits to early oncology. His books Sleeping Beauty: Memorial Photography In America, and Forgotten Marriage: The Painted Tintype & The Decorative Frame, 1860-1910, A Lost Chapter in American Portraiture both received American Photographic Historical Society awards for best publications, and Sleeping Beauty was praised by Pulitzer Prize winning author John Updike in American Heritage magazine. Images from the Burns Archive have been utilized for such nationally and internationally distributed television programs and motion pictures as The American Experience, Hannibal, The Knick, and Silence of the Lambs. 

Images: Header image is UMBC Library, by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC. Daguerreotype is “Sea Captain in Typical Distinguished Pose,” by J. H. Young, 1850s. Photography Collections, Albin O. Kuhn Library & Gallery.

Even computers make mistakes. In classical computers, tens of thousands of atoms are involved in each computation, so the system can tolerate a few mistakes and still give correct output. But in quantum computers, information is stored in single electrons, leaving no room for error.

Special techniques now allow quantum systems to operate quickly and free of errors, but speed comes at a cost. Sebastian Deffner, assistant professor of physics at UMBC, and colleague Steve Campbell, postdoctoral fellow at the National Institute of Nuclear Physics in Italy, have coauthored a study calculating that cost for the first time.

Theory suggests the tantalizing idea that using these techniques results in error-free, incredibly fast computing with no additional energy input. In practice, though, Deffner and Campbell found a correlation between a quantum process’ speed and its energy requirements. In other words, explains Deffner, “If you want to go infinitely fast, you have to pay an infinite price.”

The tradeoff between speed and accuracy in computing is why researchers have developed shortcut techniques that allow quantum systems to operate more quickly and still be reliable. But Deffner and Campbell’s work suggests there is a limit to how fast a quantum system can actually go.

“There’s this notion of ‘quantum supremacy,’ which means that quantum computers are exponentially more powerful than classical computers,” explains Deffner. “Well, if you have to operate these quantum computers infinitely slowly to avoid errors, they’re totally useless. This is where these quantum speed limits come into play.”

The “quantum speed limit” dictates the minimum time it takes for a bit of information in a quantum system to transform from one state to another. That time can be very brief, but never zero. As a result, “I don’t think you can universally say that quantum computers will be faster than classical computers,” says Deffner. Because of the quantum speed limit, classical computers may always be faster for certain applications.

While theorists may not be so concerned about the energy costs of quantum computation, understanding costs is critical for researchers working to develop real-world applications like engines made of single atoms. If a system requires a huge amount of energy to run quickly and also accurately, explains Campbell, “then your engine is useless because you’re putting more energy in than you’re getting out.”

With this finding, “There are many interesting problems that we now can attack,” says Deffner. This paper focused on one of several shortcut techniques, but future work could look at the others. He explains that more research could “give experimentalists a guideline: For this process, you might want to use this technique, but for another, you might want to use something else” for greatest efficiency.

In addition to contributing to the quest for optimal quantum computing, “none of these concepts are restricted to quantum technologies,” Deffner says. “These shortcuts are something that we can also imagine in a biological system.” After all, most biological processes are facilitated by enzymes, proteins that speed up chemical reactions that otherwise would occur too slowly to be useful.

While it’s still conjecture at this point, Campbell says, “There’s an obvious analogy” when you look at living organisms. Follow-up research could help solve a longstanding mystery. As Campbell puts it, “How does a biological system manage to do it, when we can’t in the lab with all of our fancy technology? There must be something there.”

Image: Sebastian Deffner, courtesy Sebastian Deffner.