QIP 2015

Sydney_skyline_at_dusk_-_Dec_2008
The website is up for QIP 2015, which will be held this year in beautiful Sydney, Australia. Here is a timeline of the relevant dates:

  • Submission of talks deadline: Sep 12, 2014
  • Submission of posters deadline: Oct 25, 2014
  • Decision on talks and posters submitted before talk deadline: Oct 20, 2014
  • Decision on posters submitted after talk deadline: Nov 15, 2014
  • Tutorial Session: Jan 10-11, 2015
  • Main Conference: Jan 12-16, 2015

And students, don’t worry, there are plans to include some student support scholarships, so we hope that many of you can attend. We’re looking forward to seeing you all here!

Quantum Information and Foundations at the APS March Meeting 2012

After John Preskill’s call for more quantum participation at the APS March Meeting, I couldn’t say no to a request for a blurb about quantum info and foundations! The following is a guest post by Giulio Chiribella.
Following up the previous post by John Preskill, I’d like draw your attention to the focus session “Quantum Information for Quantum Foundations” which will take place at the APS March Meeting 2012.
If you are interested in the conceptual and fundamental aspects of Quantum Information, this is the right session for you to come and present your work! The event promises to be lively and stimulating, and will be a great occasion to advertise your recent results.
On top of that, your participation will give an important support to foundational research.The foundational space at the March meeting is a great opportunity for our community.  But it is vital to keep this space alive, responding with a visible participation and presenting talks on the best of the foundational research in Quantum Information. This is not hard to do: Over the past few years there has been an enormous amount of progresses and a burst of new exciting results at the interface between Quantum Information and Foundations.  Also, we should not forget of the numerous results in Quantum Information that, even without being explicitly foundational, continue to shed a bright light on the operational features of Quantum Theory.   It is enough to have such a vibrant scientific landscape represented next March in Boston to make the foundational session memorable!
This year’s session will start with an invited talk by Valerio Scarani, who will summarize the main ideas and the latest developments on Information Causality. Valerio’s talk will be followed by a lineup of contributed talks, which hopefully would be as many and as lively as the talks of last year’s edition, organized by Chris Fuchs, which has been a very successful event.
To participate to the session, you can submit your abstract at the webpage http://www.aps.org/meetings/abstract/index.cfm. (don’t forget that the deadline for submissions is this Friday November 11th 2011!)
A last remark before concluding:  Chatting with colleagues sometimes I noticed that potential speakers are discouraged by the 12 minutes format, which seems too short to present all the relevant details. We should remind, however, that presenting details is not really the point here: The APS Meetings are huge events where the whole physics community meets to highlight advancements and to advertise new ideas across fields, not to address the specialists of one particular field.  The format of the March Meeting talks is designed to rapidly advertise new results, and if you discover that you would like to know more about one particular result…  well, during the meeting there is a lot of free time where you can interact directly (and more efficiently)  with the speaker about the details of her/his work.
So, let us take the event in the right spirit and make the foundational space at the March Meeting a real exciting forum for the exchange of new ideas!
Hope to see many of you in Boston!

GQI needs you! — John Preskill guest blogs

The following post was written by John Preskill.
I’m writing this guest post because I want all you quantum informationists to come to the American Physical Society 2012 March Meeting in Boston next February 27 through March 2. I’m telling you now, because the deadline for submitting your contributed abstract is next Friday. That’s 11/11/11, which is easy to remember. And lucky.
Why come?
Okay, maybe the March Meeting is not for everyone. Yes, last year there were over 8000 physicists at the meeting in Dallas, including over 3200 students. But that’s not everyone. No, not quite.
And those of us who came might not treasure every memory. Standing dutifully in line for what seems like hours, yet never quite reaching that much needed cup of coffee or sandwich. Missing at least 44 of 45 parallel sessions, while wondering what’s the harm in missing all 45? Surrendering to drowsiness after too many 10-minute talks in a row. Wondering who all these people are.
No, it’s not perfect. But the March Meeting is an exhilarating experience, and you really don’t want to miss it. Though you might want to consider bringing your own sandwich.
Quantum information has been well represented at the March Meeting since 2005, thanks to the efforts of the APS Topical Group on Quantum Information (GQI). Each year the membership of GQI has swelled and our participation in the March Meeting has ramped up, which allows GQI to have an even larger presence in the next meeting. Last year 311 GQI members attended and there were 324 contributed talks in the quantum information sessions. I hope we will beat those numbers substantially in 2012.
The March Meeting  provides a valuable opportunity for quantum information enthusiasts to exchange ideas with the broader physics community, and to convey the excitement of our field. Naturally, since the March Meeting is dominated by the condensed matter physicists, the interface of quantum information with condensed matter is especially emphasized, but contributions in all areas of quantum information science are welcome.
The 2012 program will be especially exciting. GQI will sponsor or co-sponsor six sessions of invited talks covering important recent developments:  topological quantum computing with Majorana fermions, quantum entanglement in many-body systems, quantum simulations, quantum computing with superconducting circuits, quantum information processing in diamond, and silicon spin qubits. In addition, there will be an invited session about career opportunities in undergraduate teaching for quantum information scientists.
If our turnout is below expectations, the GQI Program Chair gets the blame. And that’s me. So … don’t make me look bad — come to Boston and contribute a talk!
To register and submit an abstract go to:
http://www.aps.org/meetings/march/
You should flag your abstract with an appropriate quantum information Focus Topic or Sorting Category from the list available at the website, to ensure that your talk is scheduled in the proper session.
And if you are not a member of GQI, please join. Increasing our numbers means more visibility and influence for GQI within APS, and that too is good for the cause of quantum information science.
See you in Boston!

QEC '11 Registration Deadline Extension

The registration and submission deadline for QEC ’11 has been extended by a week and is now open until November 7th.
You can register here: http://qserver.usc.edu/qec11/reg.html
It looks like a great conference… I wonder if the Ghost Pontiff will show up to give his invited talk?

Dial M for Matter

It was just recently announced that Institute for Quantum Information at Caltech will be adding an extra letter to its name. The former IQI will now be the Institute for Quantum Information and Matter, or IQIM. But it isn’t the name change that is of real significance, but rather the $12.6 million of funding over the next five years that comes with it!
In fact, the IQIM is an NSF funded Physics Frontier Center, which means the competition was stiff, to say the least. New PFCs are only funded by the NSF every three years, and are chosen based on “their potential for transformational advances in the most promising research areas at the intellectual frontiers of physics.”
In practice, the new center means that the Caltech quantum info effort will continue to grow and, importantly, it will better integrate and expand on experimental efforts there. It looks like an exciting new chapter for quantum information science at Caltech, even if the new name is harder to pronounce. Anyone who wants to become a part of it should check out the open postdoc positions that are now available at the IQIM.

QSpeak Announcements for Week Ending 6/3/2011

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    Dear Colleague, the submission server for contributed talks will close in a few days: *Deadline for Submission of Abstracts for Contributed Talks: June 1, 2011* QCRYPT will take place on September 12-16, 2011 at ETH Zurich. The conference will feature … Continue reading

QSpeak Announcements for Week Ending 5/13/2011

  • QKD Summer School July 25-29, 2011
    We’d like to inform you about an innovative, five-day program this July exploring both theoretical and experimental approaches to quantum communication and quantum cryptography. Aimed at graduate students and young postdoctoral fellows from around the world, the International Summer School … Continue reading
  • QCRYPT 2011 submissions open
    Dear Colleague, the submission server for contributed talks is now open for QCRYPT 2011 – First Annual Conference on Quantum Cryptography September 12-16, 2011 ETH Zurich Deadline for Submission of Abstracts: June 1, 2011. The conference features both theoretical and … Continue reading