Academic CentreNews
The 4th QALGO meeting was held at the university of Cambridge, UK from the 14th to 16th of April 2016. The purpose of the event was to showcase recent highlights in the field by the QALGO members and other invited speakers.
The meeting was a joint event with the Heilbronn quantum algorithm series. The Heilbronn meetings have been running since 2010 and have become a well-regarded annual conference focusing on quantum algorithms. They are usually a one-day meeting and the QALGO participation meant that the event could be enlarged to three days. Including the speakers, there where 102 people who registered and attended the workshop.
April 2016: Implementation of Non-Local box in the popular game Minecraft
Barbara Terhal at RWTH Aachen supervised a Bachelor project which adds a new tool, namely the non-local PR box, to the popular game Minecraft.
The software (mod) can be downloaded and is an extension to the Qcraft Mod, see
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=85kLDRQZJBI&feature=youtu.be
This tool allows players to use non-local boxes in reducing the communication complexity of distributed functions. The implementation thus makes
the use of non-locality and super-quantum correlations accessible to a general audience.
September 2015: 3rd QALGO workshop takes place The 3rd QALGO workshop took place at the University of Latvia, from September 21 to September 23. The program consisted of 5 invited talks by speakers from outside QALGO, 8 talks by QALGO members and 2 open problem sessions to stimulate collaboration between different QALGO sites. The workshop was attended by 39 participants.
2015: QALGO member Barbara Terhal receives ERC Consolidator Grant for the project Engineering Quantum Error Correction in 2015.
June 2015: Michael Ben-Or wins 2015 Dijkstra Prize for Distributed Computing. QALGO member Michael Ben-Or (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) has won the 2015 Edsger W. Dijkstra Prize in Distributed Computing for his 1983 paper that started the field of fault-tolerant randomized distributed algorithms:http://www.podc.org/dijkstra/2015-dijkstra-prize/ May 2015: TQC 2015 takes place in Brussels. The 10th Conference on the Theory of Quantum Computation, Communication and Cryptography (TQC 2015) took place in Brussels, Belgium from May 20 to May 22. The organization committee was led by Stefano Pironio and Jérémie Roland (both from Université Libre de Bruxelles). 2015: Norbert Schuch wins ERC starting grant. 2015: Barbara Terhal designated as APS Outstanding Referee.
http://journals.aps.org/OutstandingReferees
March 2015: Article published in Nature Communications.The group at University of Cambridge together with researchers at Universidad Complutense de Madrid publishes an article "Unbounded number of channel uses may be required to detect quantum capacity" in Nature Communications. This results was also presented at AQIS 2014 and QIP 2015. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/ncomms7739 December 2014: Richard Jozsa to serve as the Program Chair of AQIS 2015.
Richard Jozsa (University of Cambridge) will serve as the Program Chair for the 15th Asian Quantum Information Science Conference (AQIS'2015) which will take place in Seoul, Korea in August 2015. AQIS focuses on quantum information processing, communication and cryptography, and is one of the top conferences in the field. http://aqis-conf.org/2015/ June 2014: QCRYPT 2014 to be held in Paris.
The 4th International Conference on Quantum Cryptography will take place between September 1-5, 2014 in Paris. The local organizing committee includes Iordanis Kerenidis (Paris Diderot). May 2014: Ronald de Wolf to serve as the Program Chair of QIP 2015.
Ronald de Wolf (CWI) will serve as the Program Chair for the 18th Conference on Quantum Information Processing (QIP'2015) which will take place in Sydney, Australia in January 2015. QIP is the top conference in the theory of quantum computing and is the place for presenting the best research in this field. May 2014: 2nd QALGO workshop takes place.
2nd QALGO workshop took place in Brussels, Belgium, from May 13 to May 16. The workshop was held together with the ERA-Net+ project DIQIP (Device Independent Quantum Information Processing). The program consisted of 4 invited talks by well known scientists from outside the two projects and a number of presentations by the members of DIQIP and QALGO. The meeting was attended by 53 participants. February 2014: Ronald de Wolf wins ERC Consolidator Grant.
Ronald de Wolf (CWI) has won an ERC Consolidator grant for his project "Progress in quantum computing: algorithms, communication, and application". QALGO now has four winners of ERC grants, with Dorit Aharonov (Hebrew University), Andris Ambainis (Latvia) and Iordanis Kerenidis (Paris) being the other three. January 2014: Paris Centre for Quantum Computing (PCQC) is created. A multi-disciplinary researcher center on quantum computing was created in Paris on 01/01/2014. The centre includes different French research organizations such as CNRS, Télécom ParisTech, participating Universities and INRIA. The director of the centre is Iordanis Kerenidis (Paris Diderot). November 2013: Andris Ambainis receives the Grand Medal of Latvian Academy of Science.
The coordinator of the QALGO project, Andris Ambainis (University of Latvia), has received the Grand Medal of Latvian Academy of Science. The Grand Medal is the highest prize for research achievements in Latvia and is awarded to two scientists every year, with one recepient from Latvia and one from abroad. Andris Ambainis is by far the youngest person to receive this award. June 2013: Andris Ambainis speaks at TEDxRiga. The coordinator of the QALGO project, Andris Ambainis (University of Latvia) gave a talk "Quantum computing: story of a wild idea" at the TEDxRiga 2013 conference. The talk describes the history of quantum computing, its main achievements and Andris Ambainis' personal involvement in quantum computing in the 17-minute TEDx format.
The talk can be viewed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rvn_3cCrl9c May 2013: QALGO kickoff meeting took place at Universite Paris Diderot from May 14 to May 17. To foster collaboration between different European projects on quantum information, the meeting was held together with FET-Open project QCS (Quantum Computer Science) and ERA-NET+ project DIQIP (Device Independent Quantum Information Processing). The program consisted of 6 invited talks and tutorials and 21 contributed talks by the members of QALGO, QCS and DIQIP. The meeting was attended by about 70 attendees from the three projects.