Stars are the fundamental building block of galaxies, and are essential for the origin and the continued existence of life in the universe. How and where do these stars form? We will try to sneak a peek at some of the maternity wards for stars, giant clouds of hydrogen gas, located in nearby spiral galaxies.

Nanotechnology, the ability to work at the atomic and molecular level, atom by atom to create materials and structures with new capabilities, will fundamentally change electronics, computers, medicine, biotechnology, and many other industries. The current research in this area is meant to explore the science of nanostructures and new materials, to develop the enabling technology for producing new classes of electronic and biological devices, and to educate the scientists and engineers who will carry this vision forward. This talk is about the prospects of Nanotechnology and the challenges in this emerging field. It is targeted to undergraduate students in Physics, Chemistry, Electrical and Mechanical Engineering. The complexity of the topic would be minimal and its level would be elementary. It would span discussion on Carbon Nanotubes, Molecular Electronics, Nano-Electromechanical Systems, Ultrathin (1.7-7nm) oxides and nitrided oxides for CMOS applications and Noise Spectroscopy.

System Design is the art and science of putting together the resources available into a harmonious whole. System Design follows some techniques that can perform a trade off between the performance metrics and resource constraints. The objective of the activity is to learn some of these techniques with respect to system design of computer networks. The study will revolve around the following major topics:

• Common resources & their metrics
• Major Design Techniques
• Multiplexing
• Pipelining & Parallelism
• Exploiting Locality
• Hierarchy
• Binding & Indirection
• Virtualization
• Randomization
• Soft State
• Exchanging State Explicitly
• Hysteresis
• Separating Data & Control
• Extensibility

Biotechnology has affected different aspects of medicine in diverse ways from prevention to treatment. Great progress in new fields of medicine today, is due to recent developments in molecular biotechnology. Recombinant DNA technology or Genetic Engineering as basic tools of molecular biology has revolutionized medical science. The use of biotechnology in medicine is growing rapidly and is opening opportunities to develop new, more effective drugs and other therapeutics. Studying the genetics of humans is allowing us to understand what happens when genes go wrong in inherited diseases and to start to develop new therapies that treat the genetic cause, not the symptoms. By studying the genetic make-up of viruses, bacteria, or fungi, we can understand how they cause disease and develop better drugs and antibiotics that target them more specifically. These biotechnological approaches will be explored in different areas of medicine including prevention, pathology, diagnosis and treatment of the diseases during this talk.

The fundamental limits of silicon computing motivated the idea of quantum computing several years ago. Although technological feats have not yet been established in the arena, promise of using quantum mechanical principles, flowing naturally from a consistent attempt to understand nature, is both assuring and satisfying. This seminar will discuss how quantum omputing is different from classical computing. It will make use of a simple quantum algorithm to show the inherent superiority of quantum techniques over their classical counterparts. This will be followed by an outline of some exciting areas in quantum information theory: namely entanglement and non-locality and will show how teleportation works. Finally, some plausible physical implementations of quantum computers will be sketched. The scope of the presentation will be elementary, and mathematics will be kept to a minimum.

Nuclear magnetic resonance is a technique that exploits the inherent spin of sub-atomic particles inside the nucleus to obtain a tell-tale signature of the nucleus. This technique finds immense use in diagnostic imaging of human tissue. This presentation will be a simple approach to the physics of the phenomenon of magnetic resonance and will also touch upon the technological aspects of the imaging mechanism. Moreover, starting from its medical applications, this talk will also address other novel and esoteric applications, especially its application to quantum computers.