Toronto CIFAR Meeting

My last trip to Canada for a CIFAR conference was….interesting.  This time I’m in Toronto for the quantum computing CIFAR meeting and I’m happy to report that the meeting is full of people who mostly believe quantum theory and who also happen to be doing very interesting work.  My favorite talk, because I’m biased to this line of work, was Robert Raussendorf’s talk on the universality for measurement-based quantum computing on the 2D AKLT state (work he did with Tzu-Chieh Wei and Ian Affleck.  The authors are TAR, heh.)  It was also interesting to hear the state of position based quantum cryptography.  It seems that history (bit commitment) is repeating itself?  Marcin Pawlowski also gave a very neat derivations of Bell inequalities that I’d never seen….using an Escher drawing!
Some photos.  First of all it was not clear if the pain the sign below was related at all to quantum information processing:
And then there was what some would consider computer scientist’s heaven:
I did manage to have a beer and write some equations in said bar.  I’m certain they are correct.