From cnet and via Matt Liefer, comes news of a new venture capital firm, known as The Quantum Wave Fund. According to their website:
Quantum Wave Fund is a venture capital firm focused on seeking out early stage private companies with breakthrough quantum technology. Our mission is to help these companies capitalize on their opportunities and provide a platform for our investors to participate in the quantum technology wave.
The cnet article clarifies that “quantum technology” means “Security, new measurement devices, and new materials,” which seems about right for what we can expect to meaningfully commercialize in the near term. In fact, two companies (ID Quantique and MagiQ) are already doing so. However, I think it is significant that ID Quantique’s first listed product uses AES-256 (but can be upgraded to use QKD) and MagiQ’s product list first describes technologies like waveform generation and single-photon detection before advertising their QKD technology at the bottom of the page.
It’ll be interesting to see where this goes. Already it has exposed several areas of my own ignorance. For example, from the internet, I learned that VCs want to get their money back in 10-12 years, which gives an estimate for how near-term the technologies are that we can expect investments in. Another area which I know little about, but is harder to google, is exactly what sort of commercial applications there are for the many technologies that are related to quantum information, such as precision measurement and timing. This question is, I think, going to be an increasingly important one for all of us.
I’ll try to post something less boring soon, but for now wanted to mention that the schedule for QIP is now online, and that early registration ends on Dec 1.
The following is a public service announcement from the QIP steering committee. (The “service” is from you, by the way, not the committee.)
Have you ever wondered why the Quantum Information Processing conference seems to travel everywhere except to your hometown? No need to wonder anymore. It’s because you haven’t organized it yet!
The QIP steering committee would like to encourage anyone tentatively interested in hosting QIP 2015 to register their interest with one of us by email prior to QIP 2013 in Beijing. The way it works is that potential hosts present their cases at this year’s QIP, there is an informal poll of the QIP audience, and then soon after, the steering committee chooses between proposals.
Don’t delay!
By the way, QIP 2014 is in Barcelona, so a loose tradition would argue that 2015 should be in North (or South!) America. Why? Some might say fairness or precedent, but for our community, perhaps a better reason is to keep the Fourier transform nice and peaked.
After 8 years at MIT, and a little over 7 years away, I will return to MIT this January to join the Physics faculty. I love the crazy nerdy atmosphere at MIT, and am really excited about coming back (although I’ll miss the wonderful people at UW). MIT Center for Theoretical Physics A typical MIT student.
Even if Cambridge doesn’t quite look like Sydney, it’s a magical place.
Combined with my fellow CTPers Eddie Farhi and Peter Shor, I will also have funding to hire a postdoc there. The other faculty doing the theory side of quantum information at MIT include Scott Aaronson, Ike Chuang, Jeffrey Goldstone and Seth Lloyd; and that’s not even getting into the experimentalists (like Orlando and Shapiro), or the math and CS people who sometimes think about quantum (like Kelner and Sipser).
The application deadline, including letters, is December 1.
You can apply here. Note that when it asks for “three senior physicists”, you should interpret that as “three strong researchers in quantum information, preferably senior and/or well-known.”
The accepted talk list for QIP 2013 is now online. Thomas Vidick has done a great job of breaking the list into categories and posting links to papers: see here. He missed only one that I’m aware of: Kamil Michnicki’s paper on stabilizer codes with power law energy barriers is indeed online at arXiv:1208.3496. Here are Thomas’s categories, together with the number of talks in each category.
Ground states of local Hamiltonians (4)
Cryptography (3)
Nonlocality (6)
Topological computing and error-correcting codes (4)
Algorithms and query complexity (6)
Information Theory (9)
Complexity (2)
Thermodynamics (2)
Other categorizations are also possible, and one important emerging trend (for some years now) is the way that the “information theory” has broadened far beyond quantum Shannon theory. To indulge in a little self-promotion, my paper 1210.6367 with Brandao is an example of how information-theoretic tools can be usefully applied to many contexts that do not involve sending messages at optimal rates.
It would be fascinating to see how these categories have evolved over the years. A cynic might say that our community is fad-driven, but instead I that the evolution in QIP topics represents our field working to find its identity and relevance.
On another note, travel grants are available to students and postdocs who want to attend QIP, thanks to funding from the NSF and other organizations. You don’t have to have a talk there, but being an active researcher in quantum information is a plus. Beware that the deadline is November 15 and this is also the deadline for reference letters from advisors.
So apply now!
On this historic occasion, let me take this opportunity to congratulate tonight’s winner: Nate Silver, of the Mathematics Party. No words yet on a concession speech from the opposition.
Fans will be pleased to know that Nate is now on twitter.
Halloween is my favorite holiday: you aren’t strong armed into unhealthy levels of conspicuous consumption, the costumes and pumpkins are creative and fun, the autumn colors are fantastic, and the weather is typically quite pleasant (or at least it was in pre-climate change/hurricane Sandy days.) You don’t even have to travel at all! So in honor of Halloween, I’m going to tell a (true) horror story about…
Back in August, I was asked to referee a paper for a certain prestigious physics journal. The paper had already been reviewed by two referees, and while one referee was fairly clear that the paper should not be published, the other gave a rather weak rejection. The authors replied seeking the opinion of a third referee, and that’s when the editors contacted me.
I immediately noticed that something was amiss: the title of the paper was nearly identical to a paper that my co-authors and I had published in that same journal a couple of years earlier. In fact, out of 12 words in the title, the first 9 were taken verbatim. I’m sorry to say, but it further raised my hackles that the authors and their universities were unknown to me and came from a country with a reputation for rampant plagiarism. Proceeding to the abstract, I found that the authors had copied entire sentences, merely substituting some of the nouns and verbs as if it were a Mad Lib. Scrolling further, the authors copied an entire theorem, taking the equations in the proof symbol-by-symbol and line-by-line!
I told all of this to the editor and he of course rejected the paper, providing also an explanation of why and what constitutes plagiarism. A strange twist is that my original paper was actually cited by the copy. Perhaps the authors thought that if they cited my paper, then the copying wasn’t plagiarism? They had even mentioned my paper directly in their response to the original reports as supporting evidence that their paper should be published. (“You published this other paper which is nearly identical, so why wouldn’t you publish ours?”) Thus, at this point I was thinking that it’s possible they simply didn’t understand that their actions constituted plagiarism, and I was grateful that the editor had enlightened them.
Fast forward to today.
I receive another email from a different journal asking to referee a paper… the same paper. They had changed the title, but the abstract and copied theorem were still there. Bizarrely, they even added a fourth author. The zombie paper is back, and it wants to be published!
Of course, I can also raise my previous objections, and re-kill this zombie paper. And I’m considering directly contacting the authors. This clearly isn’t a scalable strategy, however.
It got me thinking. Is there a better way to combat plagiarism of academic papers? One thing that often works in changing people’s behavior is shame. My idea is, perhaps if we build a website where we publicly post the names and affiliations of offenders, then this will cause enough embarrassment to stem the tide. Sort of like the P vs. NP site for erroneous proofs.
What’s your best idea for how to deal with this problem?
…with high probability.
That joke was recycled, and in recent work, Bristol experimentalists have found a way to recycle photonic qubits to perform Shor’s algorithm using only qubits. (Ok, so actually is was Kitaev who figured this out, as they are basically using Kitaev’s semi-classical QFT. But they found a way to do this with photons.) Further reductions on the number of qubits can be achieved by “compiling” to throw out the unused ones. In this case, we are left with a qubit and a qutrit. The feedback of the measurement is also replaced with the usual postselection. However, buried in the body of the paper is the main advance:
Our scheme therefore requires two consecutive photonic CNOT gates–something that has not previously been demonstrated–acting on qubit subspaces of the qutrit.
This is important progress, but until the factored numbers get a lot larger, the “size of number factored” yardstick is going to be a frustrating one. For example, how is it that factoring 143 on an NMR quantum computer takes only 4 qubits while factoring 15 takes 7?
Anyone have ideas for something more objective, like a quantum analogue of MIPS? (Incidentally, apparently MIPS is obsolete because of memory hierarchies.) Perhaps Grover’s algorithm would be good, as “compiling” is harder to justify, and noise is harder to survive. Update:
In the comments, Tom Lawson points out the real significance of factoring 21. This is the smallest example of factoring in which the desired distribution is not uniformly random, thus making it possible to distinguish the successful execution of an experiment from the effects of noise.
Nothing much to add here, but Greg Kuperberg has an excellent article at Slate which clarifies the power and limitations of quantum computers. The article is brief, accessible, and highly accurate. The next time a science journalist contacts you for a story, be sure to pass on a copy of this article as an exemplar of accurate, non-technical descriptions of quantum computing.
credit: Reuters/Alessandro Bianchi
Big news from Italy today, where a regional court has ruled that six Italian scientists (and one ex-government official) are guilty of multiple manslaughter for the deaths of 309 people that were killed in the L’Aquila earthquake in 2009.
The reaction in the English-speaking press seems largely to showcase the angle that the scientists are being persecuted for failing to accurately predict when the earthquake would hit. They are rightly pointing out that there is no currently accepted scientific method for short-term earthquake prediction, and hence there can be no way to fault the scientists for a failure to make an accurate prediction. As the BBC puts it, “The case has alarmed many in the scientific community, who feel science itself has been put on trial.”
And indeed, reading through the technical report of the “grandi rischi” commission, there does not seem to be anything unreasonable that these scientists say, either before or after the earthquake. (Unfortunately the reports are only in Italian… ma non è troppo difficile perché questo aiuta.) There is no evidence here of either misconduct or manipulation of data.
However, this is a rather delicate issue, and the above arguments in defense of the scientists may be red herrings. As BBC science correspondent Jonathan Amos reports, the issue which was under deliberation at the trial was rather about whether the scientists (under pressure from the Civil Defense) issued public statements that were overly downplaying the risk. In fact, one official, Guido Bertolaso, was recorded in a tapped telephone conversation explicitly calling for such action, and I’m sure that charges will be brought against him as well, if they haven’t already. (Strangely, the wiretap was part of a separate investigation and went unnoticed until January of this year, hence the delay.)
In fact, after the aforementioned conversation with Mr. Bertolaso, one of the seven defendants, Mr. de Bernardinis (the ex-official, not one of the scientists) told a reporter that there was “no danger” posed by the ongoing tremors, and that “the scientific community continues to confirm to me that in fact it is a favorable situation” and that the public should just “relax with a Montepulciano” (a glass of red wine from the region). Contrast this with the fact that strong earthquakes do tend to correlate time-wise with an increase in smaller tremors. Thus, although the total probability of a large event remains low, it definitely increases when there are more tremors.
Thus, the case is not just another in the long Italian tradition of show-trials persecuting scientists (c.f. Bruno, Galileo). It is at the very least a complex and delicate case, and we should resist the knee-jerk reaction to rush to the defense of our fellow scientists without first getting all of the facts. My personal opinion is that I’m reserving judgement on the guilt or innocence of the scientists until I get more information, though Mr. de Bernardinis is not looking so good.
(Update: as Aram rightly points out in the comments, a manslaughter charge seems very excessive here, and I suppose charges of negligence or maybe wrongful death would seem more appropriate.)
But there is at least one other tragedy here, and that is that these scientists might be essentially the only ones who face a trial. There are many other failure points in the chain of responsibility that led to the tragic deaths. For example, it has come to light that many of the buildings were not built according to earthquake safety regulations; the contractors and government officials were cutting corners in very dangerous ways. If those accusations are true, then that is very serious indeed, and it would be a travesty of justice if the guilty parties were to go unpunished. Update: Michael Nielsen points to an outstanding article that I missed (from over a month ago!) that discusses exactly these points. Let me quote extensively from the article:
Picuti [one of the prosecutors] made it clear that the scientists are not accused of failing to predict the earthquake. “Even six-year old kids know that earthquakes cannot be predicted,” he said. “The goal of the meeting was very different: the scientists were supposed to evaluate whether the seismic sequence could be considered a precursor event, to assess what damages had already happened at that point, to discuss how to mitigate risks.” Picuti said the panel members did not fulfill these commitments, and that their risk analysis was “flawed, inadequate, negligent and deceptive”, resulting in wrong information being given to citizens.
Picuti also rejected the point – made by the scientists’ lawyers – that De Bernardinis alone should be held responsible for what he told the press. He said that the seismologists failed to give De Bernardinis essential information about earthquake risk. For example, he noted that in 1995 one of the indicted scientists… had published a study that suggetsed a magnitude-5.9 earthquake in the L’Aquila area was considered highly probable within 20 years… [and] estimated the probability of a magnitude 5.5 shock in the following decade to be as high as 15%. Such data were not discussed at the meeting, as the minutes show.
“Had Civil Protection officials known this, they would probably have acted differently,” said Picuti. “They were victims of the seismologists”.
qubits. (Ok, so actually is was Kitaev who figured this out, as they are basically using Kitaev’s 