[81all] Thursday Lunch Speaker

[Ray Pelletier <[e-mail]>]

All;

Speaker:
  Dr. Michele Mosca
  Deputy Director of the Institute for Quantum Computing at the University of Waterloo, 
  Professor in the Department of Combinatorics & Optimization of the Faculty of Mathematics    
  Founding member of Waterloo's Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics

Logistics:
  Room 205 ABC
  Thursday, July 28, 2011
  Time: 12:00 – 12:45
  Note:  Lunch will NOT be served.

Brief description of topic:
We rely on cryptographic tools every day to provide information security objectives like privacy and authentication. Most of these tools rely on the presumed computational hardness of certain mathematical problems, like finding the prime factors of a large integer.

Quantum physics fundamentally changes the rules of the game for storing and manipulating information.

One dramatic change is the fact that factoring integers and finding discrete logarithms is easy on a quantum computer. Even earlier, it was known that the Uncertainty Principle allows us to achieve information theoretically secure cryptographic objectives - their security is not based on computation assumptions, but rather on fundamental features of quantum mechanics.

Dr. Mosca will discuss the impact of quantum information processing on information security and overview the impressive progress that has been made in harnessing quantum mechanical systems for information processing.

Bio of Speaker:

Dr. Michele Mosca obtained his DPhil in 1999 from the University of Oxford. He is co-founder and the Deputy Director of the Institute for Quantum Computing at the University of Waterloo, a Professor in the Department of Combinatorics & Optimization of the Faculty of Mathematics, and a founding member of Waterloo's Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics.

Dr. Mosca has made major contributions to the theory and practice of quantum information processing.He has done pioneering work in quantum algorithms, including the development and application of the phase estimation approach to quantum algorithms. Together with collaborators at Oxford, he realized several of the first implementations of quantum algorithms using nuclear magnetic resonance. In the area of quantum cryptography, he and his collaborators developed fundamental methods for performing reliable computations with untrusted quantum apparatus, defined the notion of private quantum channels, and developed optimal methods for encrypting quantum information using classical keys. Dr. Mosca's work is published widely in top journals, and he co-authored the respected textbook "An Introduction to Quantum Computing" (OUP).

Dr. Mosca has won numerous academic awards and honours, including the Premier's Research Excellence Award (2000-2005), Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) since 2010, Canada Research Chair in Quantum Computation (2002-present), and 2010 Canada's Top 40 Under 40.