RTC dinner on Quantum Computing (21 February 2005)

Quantum Information Processing

Are you aware of the implications of quantum physics for the future of computing and information processing? We have seen three revolutions: Computing itself, PCs, the Internet – is this the fourth? Over seventy organizations are working on various aspects of QIP and a consensus is growing that quantum physics will play a major role in the future of computing. We need to understand the basic concepts and keep up to date with the implications.

Professor Tony Hey will give an overview of the science of quantum physics and its significance both to quantum computing and quantum cryptography. He is an excellent speaker and has the knack of putting over high science very clearly. He has developed some clever demonstrations of quantum phenomena, which will make everything clear.

He is also a good friend of the RTC: when members of the RTC proposed the Quantum Computing in Europe Pathfinder Project to the European Commission he supported us strongly and gave the keynote speech to the Helsinki International Conference. Recently he has given Members of the Club much useful advice and support to secure the contracts from the DTI to raise awareness of Quantum Cryptography in the UK.

We were delighted to see he received the CBE in the New Year’s Honours list.

Professor Tony Hey CBE

Professor Tony Hey has worked in the field of parallel and distributed computing since the early 1980’s. He was instrumental in the development of the MPI message-passing standard and in the Genesis Distributed Memory Parallel Benchmark suite. In 1991, he founded the Southampton Parallel Applications Centre that has played a leading technology transfer role in Europe and the UK in collaborative industrial projects. His personal research interests are concerned with performance engineering for Grid applications but he also retains an interest in experimental explorations of quantum computing and quantum information theory. Tony Hey is also the author of two popular science books: ‘The Quantum Universe’ and ‘Einstein’s Mirror’. Most recently he edited the ‘Feynman Lectures on Computation’ for publication, and a companion volume entitled ‘Feynman and Computation’. Tony Hey is Professor of Computation at the University of Southampton and Head of the Department of Electronics and Computer Science. In March 31st 2001, he was seconded to the EPSRC and DTI as Director of the UK’s Core e-Science Programme. He is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, the British Computer Society, the Institution of Electrical Engineers and the Institution of Electrical and Electronic Engineers. Professor Hey is European editor of the journal ‘Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience’ and is on the organising committee of many international conferences.