Senetas Addresses Global Quantum Meeting

Senetas CEO John DuBois was among four keynote speakers invited to address the world’s foremost experts on Quantum Information Processing at a conference in Barcelona, Spain.

The event from October 15-19 was sponsored by the European Community’s Future and Emerging Technologies (FET - Proactive) program and had an inter-disciplinary approach covering all scientific activity in Quantum information science, whether theory or experimental activity.
Senetas spoke at the "Industrial Perspective Session" organised by the University of Geneva’s eminent Quantum expert, Professor Nicolas Gisin, and well received by the audience, mostly researchers working in the Quantum field.

John DuBois said the conference could lead to Senetas undertaking further academic collaborations
“It opened my eyes that there is a broader community with whom we can have further collaboration that includes idQuantique and University of Geneva, but we also had approaches from a number of other universities including Oxford and Copenhagen as well as NEC to see if we would be interested in discussing potential collaboration between the two organisations.

“The scientists and physicists we met this week clearly understand the commercial parts of what we need to do, meaning that we would need to go to market within a six to 12 month timeframe to commercialise products and produce a return on investment. Many of them are working on areas today in which we need to be more closely aligned because it would give us a competitive edge,” he said.

Prof Gisin said: “We thought it best to invite high level industry people to come and tell us how they see our field - of course they had different perspectives than we have – how they see the potential between what we are doing and the market.

“Having these people from very large companies, HP and NEC in Japan, and then companies that are closer to the most advanced development in Quantum Key Distribution, idQuantique and Senetas, was a very good mix.”
The message Quantum scientists got from business was: “what we are doing is good but we should think a little bit more laterally and try to be inventive,” Prof. Gisin said, acknowledging that there was a gap between what scientists were doing and what the market would take up.

Professor Gisin said the event crystallised work that had been done over the past few years in two areas: Quantum Key Distribution and Quantum Repeaters.

 

15-Oct-2008		Event Media - Barcelona Conference	(2608 KB)

 

He described the use of the Senetas/idQuantique hybrid quantum security solution in use to secure the Swiss national elections as “a very important sign”.

“There is optimism in the community that within five years we will have a Quantum Repeater on a physics level,” he said, adding that a commercial product may take some time, but a quantum repeater could extend the usable distance over which QKD can be realised from 100 km to 1000km.

“A Quantum Repeater is a rudimentary Quantum Computer and once we have it in a few qubits that it is something the scientific community will have to pass over to engineers to make large scale,” Prof Gisin said.

Gregory Ribordy of idQuantique detailed the development and deployment of the CypherNet Cerberis, the world’s first quantum cryptography solution, to secure the Swiss national elections data.

 

15-Oct-2008		Event Media - Swiss Quantum	(5692 KB)

 

Vice President of NEC’s Central Research Labs in Japan, Dr Jun’ichi Sone, told the audience NEC was involved in global collaboration on a project using Quantum techniques to accelerate NEC’s Earth Simulator, which at 65 Tflops was the world’s fastest supercomputer in 2002. He said the project aimed to improve weather pattern prediction and would also help life sciences, material science, financial activity and traffic control.

 

15-Oct-2008		Event Media - Dr Jun’ichi Sone	(19463 KB)

 

Dr Timothy Spiller, Distinguished Scientist at Hewlett Packard’s Quantum Information Processing Group in Bristol UK, said he believed Quantum Security applications would be first to market, then Quantum Repeaters, “but after that the idea is like is a Quantum Computer solving complex molecular problems such as protein folding which has application for chemical materials”.

 

15-Oct-2008		Event Media - Dr Timothy Spiller	(19471 KB)