See our online course on quantum computing or our online courses on quantum communication .
(n.b.: both images seem to show up low resolution in my browser, but when you click them they enlarge cleanly. They are just bitmaps, though, so still limited in quality.) Quantum error correction (QEC) is one of the most important and exciting subfields out there. It's very possible to make contributions looking only at encoding qubits, but to have a complete picture of managing errors in a…
Current-generation AIs are particularly good at finding and generating corresponding patterns. This can be useful when classifying images as cats or dogs (classifiers) or creating new sentences or images (genAI). But those patterns in physical systems arise from the behavior of physical laws . Oscillators are a good example -- a pendulum's behavior is due to its own potential and kinetic energy,…
Cartoons from three decades of Saturday Review on the topic of computers and robots were selected to present changing attitudes toward the technology. This review gives us the 1946 image at the top. Fascinating view of changing attitudes; the authors of the article assert that people began to take the topic more seriously as the machines became more real. (Of course it's no surprise that everyone…
Hi, quantum researchers and authors! Some friendly, informal, totally non-binding advice from your Editor in Chief at IEEE Transactions on Quantum Engineering (TQE). (Written in November 2025, posted here with small edits June 2026; my term as EiC will expire in March 2028. My policies may change before I step down, and the next EiC will certainly have their own policies, so the content here is…
1983 marked the first quarter century of CACM itself. The outgoing Editor in Chief, Robert L. Ashenhurst, marked the occasion with a January special issue reprinting some twenty-one of the best articles from the archives. The paper copy of this issue must be a collector's item. Every article in that is worth reading, even today, and I'm pleased to see that my own spelunking found many but not all…
A while ago, I created a blog post on quantum architecture researchers in Japan , mostly young ones and all very good. But I'm often asked more generally about quantum research and researchers in Japan, so here is a list to refer to. Note that it's ordered by Google Scholar h-index (in parentheses; taken when I wrote this blog post -- we're not being scientific here), which is almost inarguably a…
Speaking as an individual contributor, not as chair of the Quantum Internet Research Group : We have two new very drafty Internet Drafts out: Timing Regimes in Quantum Networks and their Physical Underpinnings Get the HTML version , which renders the figures, names and equations right.This one is intended to bridge the physics and the network engineering; there should be no design decisions in…
Hilarious, inevitable, tactically troubling, and evidence of our voluntary-participation surveillance society. https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2026/03/20/stravaleaks-france-s-aircraft-carrier-located-in-real-time-by-le-monde-through-fitness-app_6751640_4.html Strava is the app I use to record my bike rides; "everybody" is on it. It can obscure your start and end points if you don't…
As you know by know, our beloved Professor Dave Farber passed away last month. The impact of his loss will resonate for a long time. Here is my list of articles about his passing, plus a few other things. Let me know if you see other articles that should be included. (Picture above: we cooked Dave turkey on Christmas Day, 2025.) Perhaps my favorite quote from this set of sources is from Dave…
[Photo is at Miyajima, Hiroshima, on Dave's 90th birthday trip: Keiko Okawa, Yukie Shibuya, Yasuo "tsucchy" Tsuchimoto, Kaori Suzuki, Rod Van Meter, Dave Farber, Jun Murai, Catharina Maracke] My comments from Dave Farber's funeral on February 13, 2026: David Jack Farber. Born April 17, 1934. Passed away February 7, 2026. Occupation: professor. Those are the basic facts you will see on a census…
If anybody out there is using our Multiharp toolkit for counting photons, a new release is out: https://crates.io/crates/tdc_toolkit https://docs.rs/tdc_toolkit/latest/tdc_toolkit/multiharp/device/struct.MH160DeviceConfig.html https://github.com/moonshot-nagayama-pj/tdc_toolkit Thanks to Andrew and the rest of the team who do the hard work!
Since 1996, Science magazine has named a single " Breakthrough of the Year " as well as several runners-up. This year's is the growth of renewable energy , especially solar. But what about the past thirty years, can we see any themes or a bigger picture? Here is a quick look at the categories, as roughly laid out by me: Life sciences: 17 Human health: 8 HIV (understanding, treatment as prevention,…
(Just a quick note for now, more later.) EU European competence framework for quantum technologies (CFQT) ACM CS2023: ACM/IEEE-CS/AAAI Computer Science Curricula
Wow, right away in January there are things I find relevant to our work today. One such is an article on a test to see if documentation of control flow or data structures helps more in understanding a piece of code, coming down firmly on the side of the data structure. Of course, that was a very limited test done with a short program and without the benefit of today's tools and practices, but it's…
I am working on a policy for appropriate use of AI (especially but not only LLMs) in my classes and research group. It's an important task, and I'm trying to not just lay down a set of written rules to be blindly followed but a bit of history and a set of principles. I do expect the policy to be revised regularly as the technology evolves, but I want to clarify my own thinking and encourage…
237 votes for Takaichi Sanae ( 高市 早苗) on the first ballot in the Lower House. It's official, she will become Japan's first woman prime minister. Interestingly, she worked for Democratic (and liberal) Congresswoman Pat Schroeder of Colorado as a congressional fellow in the late 1980s, when Takaichi was in her mid-twenties. Either she was still forming her political views or she didn't know enough…
I found some of the key history of the MOSIS Project I was looking for! The table above is from a 1991 DARPA report, DARPA Technical Accomplishments. Volume 2. An Historical Review of Selected DARPA Projects , Accession Number: ADA241725 . During the 1980s, MOSIS fabbed 12,201 projects (computer chips designed by researchers from universities, government labs and companies) in technologies ranging…
If you're reading this, and you know anything about the early days of the MOSIS Project at USC/ISI, mosey on over to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:MOSIS and drop a note there. I'm trying to enhance the article on MOSIS, but of course it needs to be documented history, not just, "I remember..." or "I think..." If you don't know what MOSIS is, it's the Metal Oxide Semiconductor Implementation…
Yesterday (August 8) we were in the city of Nagasaki. It's a beautiful little place, with a charming streetcar and centuries of important history, especially in Japan-Dutch relations during the Edo Period. And yet, of course, its most famous role in history is now, and very likely will remain, as the target of humanity's second atomic bombing of other humans. We visited the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb…
If you're a history buff, a collection of writings on the history of the Internet in Asia: https://sites.google.com/site/internethistoryasia/home?authuser=0
Professor Peter Gutmann , of the University of Auckland, a well-known computer security researcher, has made something of a name for himself as a quantum skeptic, at least with respect to quantum cryptanalysis and post-quantum cryptography (PQC). His argument is roughly two-pronged: Quantum computers aren't making progress on factoring at all; and even if they did, computer security people and…
Alan Jay Smith was a consultant for a company I worked for in the late 1990s. Very smart guy, already seemed "old" to me then, but he was quite a bit younger then than I am now. Geez. He worked on processor architecture, but his most influential work has been on storage systems, and here in 1981 he was already deep into what became known around this time as hierarchical storage management (HSM)…
(Note: This was originally written in summer and fall 2022, and for various reasons I decided not to publish it then, despite the obviously enormous amount of work I put into it. One reason was that I wasn't completely satisfied with it, so I still consider it to be a work in progress. Given the enormous volumes of writing out there dedicated to the broad topic of web3, it would also be rather…
(PAM-3 eye pattern; image from Wikipedia ) This blog posting is still in editing, and is posted just so I could talk to some students about elements of the contents. Recently, I posted about how SDH optical networks encode bits at the physical level . My interest in the topic stems from a desire to know how to multiplex classical and quantum information on different channels/wavelengths , and part…
(Image taken from Seattle Times, where it is credited the World War II Foundation.) The New York Times reported last week that Julia Parsons passed away. (The Seattle Times has a copy not behind a paywall .) She was probably the last living member of the WWII Naval Communications Annex team responsible for deciphering Enigma messages sent to and from German U-boats. She joined the WAVES in 1942,…