John Preskill points me to Workshop on Classical and Quantum Information Security to be held December 15-18, 2005 at Caltech:
This workshop will bring together researchers from a variety of backgrounds who work on different aspects of classical and quantum information security. Participants will strive to identify issues and problems of common interest that can be effectively addressed by pooling their expertise.
Looks like a very broad spectrum of researchers will be attending, which should make for a very interesting workshop. Overcoming communication barriers is often the first step in interesting new research directions, and I’m sure one hope of the workshop is to aid this difficult process.
Which reminds me of a documentry I saw a few years ago which tried to identify why certain schools were much better at producing (not buying 😉 ) Nobel prizes. What the documentry argued was that the common theme for the top Nobel producing institutes was that they all had very loose definitions of what was considered “in a particular discipline.” Or, the way I like to think about it: the energy landscape on the space of different research programs had very shallow minimums at the top Nobel producing institutes, whereas at most other schools, these wells were very deep…sometimes being even infinite square wells! This is, of course, an oversimplification, but I’m glad to see that Caltech (highest Nobel prize count per member of the community that I know of ) is hosting a workshop which so well imbodies this spirit.