This year’s Quantum Information
Processing conference (QIP) was held in the beautiful and vibrant city of
Sydney, Australia from the 12th to the 16th of January.
Close to 225 researchers from across the world attended the conference. The
talks were hosted at University of Technology Sydney (UTS). Runyao Duan led the
local organizing committee, and its members were from UTS, University of
Sydney, Macquarie University and University of Queensland. They did a splendid
job in ensuring that the conference was a grand success.
The 18th edition of
QIP featured about 40 talks and 150 posters covering various important advances
in quantum information processing over the past year. A detailed summary of all
the talks presented at QIP can be found on the Quantum Pontiff blog http://dabacon.org/pontiff/?p=10785,
where Aram Harrow and Steve Flammia were “live-blogging” the conference. In
this report, I shall focus on the things not covered by Aram and Steve,
especially on the business meeting.
A lot of buzz and anticipation
prevailed around this year’s business meeting at QIP. This was largely due to
the pending decision on the question of whether “to parallelize or not
parallelize” QIP. Here is some
background on the issue. QIP, as it stands today, is a single session-track
conference featuring two kinds of talks: 50-minute plenary talks and 30-minute
talks. During a five-day period minus one free afternoon, this allows for about
40 talks during the entirety of the conference. However, the number of
submissions to the conference has seen a steep increase over the years due to
the explosion of research in quantum information processing. What began as a
workshop with a few tens of submissions in the early nineties, QIP today
receives several hundred submissions each year. Thus the acceptance rates at
QIP are now terrifyingly low; the rate for this year’s QIP for a talk was just
about 20%.
Each year the program committee
has been faced with the increasingly difficult task of rejecting at least 20 to
30 good submissions which they think are just as good as some of the other
talks that make the cut. This has led the steering committee to consider
introducing parallel sessions with the view that it would allow for more talks.
In order to hear the public opinion on the issue, Stephanie Wehner posted a
survey on the Web for the QIP community. Stephanie presented the results of the
survey at the business meeting. The public sentiment on the issue seemed
largely in favor of parallel sessions. When the result of the survey was shared
at the business meeting, however, a major concern was raised about the possible
fragmentation of the community into sub-communities. In response to this
concern, Peter Shor, spoke about how not parallelizing QIP at this point could
have the same fragmenting effect at a much graver level. Peter pointed out the
precedent of STOC and FOCS, where the latter remained a single session
conference for a long time, while the computer science community had grown many
fold in size. Peter noted that in due course of time, when certain factions of
the community felt that they weren’t being sufficiently accepted at the
conference, they decided to split away with their own conference, the STOC.
This is already beginning to happen in the quantum information community with
the birth of various conferences such as QCrypt, QEC, and Beyond I.I.D. in
Information Theory. These conferences provide venues for topics that are
becoming more marginalized and less fashionable at the larger QIP conference.
Nevertheless, it was also pointed
out by the steering committee that parallel sessions, even if introduced, would
only occur during certain sessions. For instance, the plenary talks would still
be held in common, and therefore couldn’t result in a complete splitting of the
community. At this point, the question of logistics surfaced regarding a single
track for plenary sessions and two parallel sessions for other talks, namely
the need to secure one big room and two small rooms at the conference venue,
which could be more expensive. Barry Sanders, the lead organizer for QIP 2016,
in his presentation about the conference venue at Banff (near Calgary, Canada),
however guaranteed that this would not be an issue at next year’s QIP. From the
pulse of things at this year’s QIP, it seems rather likely that we will see
parallel sessions in next year’s edition. Yet, this is by no means a certainty.
Another development worth
mentioning from the business meeting was the proposal for open refereeing of
papers at QIP. Aram Harrow and Steve Flammia, who had already implemented such
a scheme at TQC (Theory of quantum computation, communication and cryptography)
2014, put forth the proposal. Aram explained why he thought referee reports of
QIP submissions should be available on the public domain. The real purpose
cited was not the obvious ones---it was neither to make it open the reasons
behind why a paper is accepted or rejected, nor to push referees to write
reports according to what this year’s program committee chair Ronald de Wolf
called the “golden rule” of refereeing, namely to write referee reports the way
one would like his/her own paper to be reviewed. The real reason cited was
rather simply to make available expert summaries and critiques, which could
immensely benefit other researchers, especially the younger researchers, which
otherwise go underutilized aiding in the publication decision process alone.
Although the general perception about the idea was positive, it seems unlikely
that the QIP steering committee would recommend the scheme as a whole to the
program committee. Ronald and Andrew Doherty raised concern about how such a
scheme could result in a huge extra burden on the already over-burdened program
committee. However, it seems likely that, as an intermediate step, the program
committee summaries of the accepted talks would be made available to the public
at QIP 2016, as was done earlier at TQC 2014.
The business meeting also saw ETH
Zurich and Microsoft Research bid for hosting QIP 2017. The public opinion
seemed to be in favor of the ETH bid for 2017, while it seemed that Microsoft
could potentially host QIP during the subsequent year, i.e., 2018.
Earlier, proceedings at QIP this
year kicked off with tutorial sessions during the weekend in the lead-up to the
conference. Entry to the tutorials was included as part of the conference
registration. Itai Arad of CQT covered the local Hamiltonian problem (I
couldn’t make this one due to flight delay.) The second speaker of the day was
Roger Colbeck of Univ. of York, who discussed the topic of device independence
in quantum information processing. Roger described the goal of the device
independence model in the context of cryptography as to provide unconditional
security while allowing for device failure or tampering, and discussed the
various tools that go into proving security of protocols within the model. He
also highlighted one of the main challenges of the approach as the need of
protocols that allow for reuse of the devices while guaranteeing unconditional
security. On the second morning, Krysta Svore of Microsoft gave a fascinating
tutorial on the various components that go into the design and implementation
of quantum software architecture for an automated control and programming of
tomorrow’s large-scale quantum computers. Later, Alexandre Blais of Univ. of
Sherbrooke delivered the final tutorial on superconducting qubits. Addressing a
largely theoretical audience, Alexandre did a splendid job of describing the
basic physics behind the superconducting transmon qubit. He also discussed the
control and readout via strong coupling to a microwave resonator along with
results from various recent experiments.
The social aspects of the
conference included a banquet and a rump session. The banquet was a fancy
affair, being held on a showboat. The Sydney weather, which had been dull and
rainy until then, had moved to great, UV-rich sunshine just in time for the
banquet. The boat set sail from the Sydney Darling Harbor around half past
seven with plenty of food, beer, wine, and the awesome folks from the
conference. Some spectacular views of the Sydney skyline in the magical
twilight soon followed, which were a real treat. Despite being given numerous
warnings from the organizers, many participants unfortunately “missed the
boat”.
This year’s rump session was a
fun ride with the lighter side of the QIP community. The session was held at
the “Manning” bar in the University of Sydney. Steve Flammia introduced himself
as the “MR---the Master of Rump” for the night. Among the speakers, John Smolin
poked fun at the ensuing trend of adding the “quantum” suffix to literally
anything in the world in the name of quantum information research. Later Daniel
Gottesman decided to take the new proposal for open refereeing to a whole new
level. While we’ve heard of double-blinded refereeing, where the identity of
the authors is conceals from the referees, Daniel suggested triple and
quadruple blinding, where the text of the paper is encrypted from the referee
and where the talk is concealed from the audience, respectively.
From excellent and stimulating
talks and posters, through the intriguing business meeting, to the fun-filled
banquet and rump session, QIP 2015 had it all. Parallel sessions or not, you
can’t help, but be excited about QIP 2016 already.
Kaushik P. Seshadreesan is a doctoral student in physics at
Louisiana State University, working under the supervision of Jonathan P.
Dowling and Mark M. Wilde. He will graduate with his PhD in quantum
information theory and quantum metrology in May of 2015.
