Speaker: Neil Henderson
“He who is good with a hammer thinks everything is a nail.”
- Modified quote from the original by Abraham Maslow
How does one sell security? How does one commercialize such nebulous concepts such as “Trust”, “Security” and “Cryptography”? Cryptography, which is just one building block of security, is based on other more abstract building blocks such as algorithms which have a foundation on hard mathematical problems.
CryptoWorks21 at the University of Waterloo, together with representatives from the Standards Council of Canada (SCC) and the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI), are proud to present a lunch-time standards session.
Candidate: Michael Mazurek
Title: Testing classical and quantum theory with single photons
Speaker: Heather Hoff
Abstract: Software is a key asset of any new business. How do you protect the results of weeks or months of hard labour? Who owns the software and how do I mange its development to ensure its inherent value is maintained? Should I use Open Source, or even contribute to Open Source? What are the benefits and how does this measure up against the risks?
Quantum circuits based only on matchgates are able to perform non-trivial (but not universal) quantum algorithms. Because matchgates can be mapped to non-interacting fermions, these circuits can be efficiently simulated on a classical computer. One can perform universal quantum computation by adding any non-matchgate parity-preserving gate, implying that interacting fermions are natural candidates for universal quantum computation within the circuit model.
There is strong evidence that a sufficiently large fault-tolerant quantum computer would solve certain computational problems exponentially faster than any classical computer. How can quantum algorithms and complexity theory help guide the way forward in our current era of small and noisy quantum computers?
Speaker: Viona Duncan
Every time you take a photo, photons strike different parts of your image sensor in different quantities. In daytime, your sensor detects more than a billion photons, which are more than 1000 photons per pixel for a basic one-megapixel camera. Can you take a photo with one photon per pixel? I will address how to perform accurate imaging at a light level of one photon per pixel.
Quantum mechanics reveals that at its core, the world is not as it seems – it is far more interesting.
In the quantum world, outcomes are counter-intuitive, differing from what we expect based on our everyday experiences. The particle physicist Richard Feynman remarked that this means we seem to have to walk “a logical tightrope” when we talk about a quantum system.