10th QSC General Assembly in Amsterdam
The 10th QSC General Assembly, organized by Jonas Helsen and Liubov Markovich, returned to the OBA in Amsterdam. As usual, the day started with reconnecting with our colleagues from different nodes over coffee, and this time also over delicious banana bread.
The two main talks of the day were both given by the senior theory researchers; by Léo Ducas (CWI, MI Leiden) and Ronald de Wolf (CWI, QuSoft). Léo Ducas took us on a tour of lattice-based cryptography, introducing the main problems in the hot-topic field, and visualizing his work on random walks in Arakelov class groups. Later, Ronald de Wolf spent a full hour thoroughly debunking the myth that there has not been major progress on quantum algorithms since Shor’s groundbreaking factoring algorithm, especially in the field of optimization. Afterwards, Ronald de Wolf received a bouquet from the QSC in recognition of the Gödel prize he received earlier this year.
The shorter talks were given by two of the junior QSC scientists, and both presented the experimentalist side of QSC. Kirsten Kanneworff (LION, Leiden) in particular gave a talk that truly embodies the QSC collaborative goals: experimentally realizing quantum position verification protocols, developed collaboratively with theorists in QuSoft. Fenglei Gu (Qutech, Delft) gave a talk on the hybrid approach to quantum repeaters.
Finally, the day included the (inaugural?) QSC tournament in TiqTaqToe, a game developed and presented by Evert van Nieuwenburg (LIACS, Leiden). The lucky winner taking home the traveling trophy was Marten Folkertsma (CWI/QuSoft).
