The First Nokia Bell Labs-IHES Workshop on October 2 - IHES
Scientific activity

The First Nokia Bell Labs-IHES Workshop on October 2

This first joint workshop marks the Nokia Bell Labs donation to the Institut des Hautes Etudes Scientifiques.

The workshop included two talks which indirectly reminisced the early years of the Bell Laboratories (now Bell Labs part of Nokia corporate) which has now a strong settlement in Paris Saclay campus. Nokia Bell Labs is among the largest and also the oldest private research laboratories in the world and maybe the only one delivering a continuous stream of impressive scientific discoveries and theoretical contributions for the whole last century.

The first talk was by professor Alain Aspect of Institut d’Optique. Prof Aspect is wordwide known as the physicist who has built the first experimental confirmation of photon quantum entanglement theory. His contribution solved the famous Einstein Podolski Rosen paradox and led to new major perspectives in telecommunication and encryption. This is a way to look back on the major contributions of Bell Labs in quantum technology such as the transistor invented in 1948, and to look forward to quantum computing and communication.

The second talk was by professor Sergio Verdu of Princeton University. Prof Verdu is the recipient of the Shannon Award in 2007 for his seminal contributions on information theory, in particular in data compression and transmission optimization when time and capacity are critical. Of course his talk reminisced the history of the Information Theory, formulated in 1948 by Claude Shannon in Bell Labs, but his contributions bring a bridge toward the coming of the new generations of high performance wireless communications.

Organizers : Philippe Jacquet (Nokia – FR/Paris-Saclay), Emmanuel Ullmo (IHES)

Workshop webpage.