Time: Saturday, February 18, 2012, 1:30 PM-4:30 PM
Venue: Room 212 (VCC West Building)

Quantum information science emerged during the past decade as an interdisciplinary endeavor engaging mathematics, computer science, and branches of physics, material science, chemistry, and, recently, biology. Quantum information science has revealed irreconcilable conflicts between commonly accepted but unproven precepts of different disciplines: particularly physics, computer science, and mathematics. The resolution of this problem will either transform our understanding of the validity of quantum mechanics or computational complexity theory, or both, with potential impact ranging from the foundations of physics to practical matters of electronic commerce. Meanwhile, quantum information science has transformed the organization of research and has led to the formation of interdisciplinary research institutes worldwide, most notably in the Asia-Pacific circumference and in Canada. Quantum information science provides a laboratory for viewing scientific work-force trends, notably, the flow from West to East, and within Asia; the development of new educational curricula; and patterns of intellectual property policy and transitions to industry in a vibrant field of long-term research.
The invited speakers are heads of 5 new institutes in this field who will address frontier problems of research and institutional response. They are from 5 different countries:

Prof. Raymond Laflamme from Institute for Quantum Computing, Canada,
http://iqc.uwaterloo.ca/

Prof. J. Ignacio Cirac from Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics, Germany
http://www.mpq.mpg.de/cms/mpqhome/index.html

Prof. Artur Ekert from Center for Quantum Technologies, Singapore
http://www.quantumlah.org/

Prof. Andrew Yao from Institute for Interdisciplinary Information Sciences, Tsinghua University, China
http://iiis.tsinghua.edu.cn/en/

Prof. Charles W. Clark from Joint Quantum Institute, USA
http://jqi.umd.edu/

Organizer:
Charles W. Clark, Joint Quantum Institute
Amy Wang, Tsinghua University
Moderator:
Amy Wang, Tsinghua University