A list of conferences/workshops that I have attended at one time or another.
This covers the period from the early days in Oxford to my current wanderings from Singapore in reverse chronological order.
24C3 (December 2007)
Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin. This is my first time at a hackers conference. It was a great experience. The place was filled with interesting really smart people doing all sorts of wacky stuff. The reason we went there was to do a live demo of our quantum cryptography kit. I am still in shock that after shipping everything from Singapore, the kit worked like a charm. We essentially had no problems in the setup and we could exchange keys and violate a Bell Inequality live in the congress hall.
Apart from that, we had a great time with a pair of OLPCs that the nice guys from the project let us play with for a while. We were trying to make them run the crypto software. We, and all the people who helped out, didn't quite get the whole thing working but it was extremely close. It was possible to get the data acquisition hardware working and the user interface running. Even the synchronization (which relies on fftw3) run with no problems, but the continuous acquisition did not ... I guess we'll give it another shot if we can get our hands on a couple of the little green machines.
UPDATE: I have put up a gallery of pictures with the OLPCs.
QIPC (October 2007)
Quantum Information Processing and Communication 2007. This conference took place in Barcelona in October 2007. It was a conference of exceptional quality and I had a blast. The conference was organized by the people from ICFO (Toni Acin) and they made it a really balanced and enjoyable event. I was really happy to get to see some of the ICFO labs and what is currently going on over there. I gave a contributed talk on the last day of the conference.
CLEO-PR (August 2007)
The Pacific Rim version of the Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics was this year held in Seoul, Korea. It was quite an interesting meeting. I spent most of my time hanging out in the talks about microscopy and medical imaging rather than on my home turf of quantum information. We presented three things in this conference, a poster from the neutral atom experiment, a poster about a very fast switching topology and an oral presentation on daylight free-space QKD with entangled photons. Some photos of the conference and of the Korean DMZ in Seoul 2007.
Benasque (June 2007)
I have said this already, but Benasque is a great little conference. No fixed program and lots of opportunities to talk to everybody. This year it was perhaps too relaxed for my taste and there were even fewer experimentalists than before ... in any case, well worth it. A few pictures of some of the hiking can be found at:Benasque 2007
TropicalQKD (June 2007)
Very nice workshop organized by the people at the ICQ in Waterloo, Canada. Calling it Tropical was a bit cheeky given the latitude of Waterloo. We thought that as probably the only truly "tropical" QKD group, we should go and show a QKD system working among palm trees or something. Anyway, the conference was excellent and provided lots of chances of interaction.
QCMC (Nov-Dec 2006)
The International Conference on Quantum Communication Measurement and Computing (qcmc2006.org) in Tsukuba, Japan. This promises to be very exciting. Not only is it my first time in Japan, but also the conference is packed with people from the field. I expect to see there my thesis supervisor and a bunch of others that I have not had a chance to catch up with in quite a while ... that's one of the disadvantages of being in the equator. I'll be presenting a poster on the measurements of the joint spectrum and polarization correlations in parametric down-conversion. This is work done with Poh Hou Shun, Ivan Marcikic, Lum Chune Yang and Christian Kurtsiefer. For details have a look at quant-ph/0608009.
UPDATE: I am back from Japan. The conference was extremely interesting. I was particularly taken with the reports on experiments combining photon counting and continuous variables techniques. It was about time these two subfields really came together! On the atom/interaction side I found the experiments from Kuzmich and Lvovsky very exciting and quite elegant. Also I liked Hideo Mabuchi's set of results and directions very much. BTW, was I the only one to realize that in his quantum control graphs it said "Hi Mom"? Aaaaanyway ... other things going on was that somehow I seemed to annoy Prem Kumar with a question about his polarization entanglement generation in a fiber. I asked a question about the visibility in two complementary basis and I think he missunderstod what I meant. I just noticed that all the visibilities quoted in his slides where for the natural basis of the experiment and wanted to know what happens in a different one ... I think he did not see the point of what I was asking.
Towards Quantum Standards (May 2006)
This is a first a attempt to bring the young quantum industry, the potential consumers and the academic community together to agree to some standards in the field of quantum information. The initiative came from Sonia Schirmer of the Quantum Technology Group (Cambridge-MIT Institute) and the workshop took place in the Royal Society London 25th and 26th May 2006.
The idea of setting some standards for this field excellent. The main idea is to help the nascent quantum industries by making their specs and systems more transparent to the potential customers, thus clarifying what they should expect out of a quantum cryptography product and how it is going to interface with the rest of the world. Even from a purely academic perspective we could greatly benefit if we agree on some common terminology and standard figures of merit when describing current experiments. A look at the literature makes it almost inmediately obvious that it is not easy to do a fair comparison between implementations because of the different ways of reporting the results.
People I have met for the first time in this conference include representatives from MagiQ, idQuantique and QinetiQ from industry and some spooks from governement agencies.
A result from the discussion that took place is the creation of a website centered around quantum standards (www.qcrypto.org).
TSLELS IV (December 2005)
The Theoretical Studies Laboratory at the University of Putra Malaysia (KL) organizes a Workshop series every year. In 2005 the title was "Quantum Information". I gave a series of talks on the role of distinguishability in entanglement creation via PDC (part1, part2, part3, part4).
Benasque (June-July 2005)
The best conference concept ever. Virtually no structured program and a chance to just hang out and talk to lots of people about physics. It ran from June 12 to July 1st but I left slightly early. Got to hear for the first time about all the fuss about matrix product states.
ACQAO (December 2004)
The acronym stands for Australian Conference on Quantum Atom Optics. It is a really nice workshop taking place in Kioloa. This is an outpost of ANU in the coast with some sleeping quarters, some relatively primitive conference infrastructure and an excellent atmosphere. All in all, very interesting. The time I was there I got to talk to Alan Aspect and Bill Philips. Also got to know some new people such as Blair Blakie and for no reason I could discern ended up having to justify the existence of the whole field of quantum information to Peter Drummond. It still escapes me how I ended up in that situation.
APWQIS II (January 2004)
Our own local creation in Singapore. Unfortunately heavily biased towards theoretical and mathematical aspects so my heart was not really in it. It also took place between the 2rd and 15th of January so it coincided with the start of the semester.
NSF/AAS Joint Workshop on Quantum Computation (January 2003)
It took place in Newport (near Sydney) on January 2003. An excellent conference with lots of different aspects of quantum computation being presented. It was interesting to have a look at the huge solid state effort going on in Oz. Apart from that, being Australia and being my first time there, it was a lot of fun. I thought Sydney was an amazing place. Having walked around the city for a while I could not help thinking : why would anybody leave such a place?
International Conference on Quantum Information (July 2002)
Took place in Oviedo, Spain from 13-18 July 2002. An interesting mix of theory and experiments.
Euresco conference on quantum entanglement (March 2002)
Organized by the 3 witches. Took place in San Feliu from 23-28 March 2002.
QUICK (April 2001)
A fantastic conference on quantum crypto. It took place in Cargese, Corsica from 7-13 April in 2001. Lots of things happened there. Presented results from entanglement "amplification".
VIII Escuela de Otono de Fisica Teorica (September 2001)
A small workshop organized by the Spanish Physical Society. The topic was quantum information and it took place in Santiago de Compostela on September 3-14 2001.
CLEO/IQEC Europe (September 2000)
Nice 10-15 September. Really big conference but it was my first so I was in a bit of a daze.
