AQIS ‘09 – deadline 14th of June

Just a quick post to remind folk that the AQIS ‘09 submission deadline is just around the corner (June 14th at 11:59 p.m. in US Pacific Standard Time).

This year’s AQIS will be held in Nanjing from August 26 – 29.

QIP 2010 dates announced

The dates for QIP 2010 have been announced – it will take place in Zurich from the 18th to the 22nd of January 2010.

Keep your eyes on the QIP 2010 website for submission and registration info etc.

The Tricki looks awesome

I just had a look at the Tricki that Tim Gowers has set up, it looks like it is going to be an incredibly useful resource for solving mathsish problems!

I walked past Royal Albert Hall on my way to work this mornin

This week I’m attending the IMA conference on quantum computing and the complexity of quantum simulation.

Looks like it’s going to be a good conference. Daniel Gottesman is kicking off with a review(ish) talk on “Computationally hard problems in spin systems”…

Looking for work

Observant readers may have noticed that I have added a few new pages to this blog recently – a “Research” page and a “CV” page. Those of you who have hung around the sciencish blogs enough will realize that the appearance of these sort of pages is normally a pretty clear symptom of someone looking for a new job.

I’ve now been living and working in Bristol for almost 20 months. I don’t know if my colleagues realize this but I have really enjoyed working here. The Quantum Information group and the Theoretical Computer Science group have really been a wonderful collection of folk to work with. I would strongly recommend Bristol as a place for anyone to pursue these lines of research.

Quite a few people have asked why I am leaving if I enjoy my job in Bristol so much? Well, I could say the answer is money, but I probably could have hunted down money to stay if I really wanted to. I guess part of the answer is that I don’t want to commit to staying here in the long term, staying here probably won’t get me to where I want to be in two or three years time. On top of that I’d very much like to live somewhere that makes it easier to see my girlfriend (who lives in Germany) more often.

So, right now I’m writing this blog post when I should be polishing up my research statement to send off to prospective employers… Why am I procrastinating? Well I guess it is because this is the part of being a scientist that I hate the most. Applying for jobs has the tendency to make me focus on all my own failings, it makes me think about all those things in my career that I should have done better.

One thing that I take some comfort from has been the direction that my own research has taken in the last year or so. Being around people who encourage my whacky ways has helped a lot and now I’m pursuing questions that I think are genuinely interesting and, thankfully, it seems that other people also believe this.

Now, back to the job applications… cross your fingers for me if you are so inclined!

Congratulations Dr Will

Yay! Will Matthews is now Dr Will Matthews. Congratulations Will!

Yay! I’ve now been published in a Royal Society journal

Yay! My paper with Dan Shepherd that was previously titled Instantaneous Quantum Computation has been appeared online in the Proceedings of the Royal Society A with the title Temporally Unstructured Quantum Computation.

I wonder if any royals read the Proceedings A?

Update: I forgot to add that the published version is roughly 100 bazillion times easier to read than the version that appeared originally on the arXiv. So if anyone out there was wanting to dive in and learn this material they should start with the published paper or possibly the latest arXiv version.

Matt Hastings is guest posting over at Tobias’ place

For those who are into the adiabatic model of quantum computation I suggest going here and having a read.

Tobias has gone all open sciencish

Yay for Tobias and his new blog!

If you be all quantumish and are a fan of open science then I highly recommend giving it a look. Having worked a lot with Tobias I can say that he has loads of excellent ideas and the right sort of research style to make this blog an extremely interesting read. Hopefully this blog will become a new place for some of us to do our discussin’ and researchin’.

So far Tobias has been posting thoughts which stem from this recent paper with Ashley Montanaro (which you may have seen Ashley talk about at QIP) on all sorts of things involving quantum boolean functions.

Quantum computers – for when you can’t use a $5 wrench

Sadly, this is probably why I have a job.