Next week, I'll be at a workshop in Vienna, VA that has been organized to help come up with a national strategy for public investment in quantum information science and technology.

To quote from the workshop website:

This Workshop on Quantum Information Science (QIS) has been organized in response to the NSTC report. It brings together leading theorists and experimenters drawn from physical science, computer science, mathematics, and engineering who will assess recent progress in QIS and identify major goals and challenges for future research.

The report in question, titled "A Federal Vision for Quantum Information Science came out this January, from the US National Science and Technology Council which is part of the White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy.

All in all, a very interesting and promising development, which suggests serious potential for US government support for research in quantum information science, which is to say quantum computation, quantum computing, quantum cryptography, the use of quantum information science concepts to understand and engineer the behavior of complex physical systems, including quantum control and quantum metrology.  The report emphasizes computation and the understanding of new quantum states of matter and quantum phase transitions.  The organization appears to have been fairly rapid---probably carried out at Caltech, where John Preskill heads the Institute for Quantum Information, since that's where the website is located and the administrative coordinator is the IQI's.

The invited speaker lineup looks excellent, though some have complained that it's not representative of some aspects of quantum information research (metrology, i.e. precision quantum measurement, is covered only lightly) and some top US groups (like the quantum cryptography effort led by Richard Hughes at Los Alamos) are missing (though I don't know why).  Evenings will involve open discussions on strategy for QIS research, though I worry we may be burned out after full days of excellent technical presentations.

I'm looking forward to hearing Anne Broadbent talk about Universal Blind Quantum Computation with Joseph Fitzsimmons and Elham Kashefi, and not only because a crucial component of it is the use of quantum authentication codes, a concept developed my collaborators Claude Crepeau, Daniel Gottesman, Adam Smith, Alain Tapp, and me.  (Hey, this is my blog, so shameless self-promotion is de rigeur.)