Programme:
1000               Coffee/Discussion
1025               Opening Remarks by Natalia Korolkova (St Andrews)
1030               Talk by Prof. Barry Sanders (Calgary): Oracle Identification Problem and a Deutsch-Josza type of algorithm for 'continuous variable' quantum information
1130               Talk by Prof. John Rarity (Bristol)
1230               Lunch (sandwich lunch and coffeee/tea will be provided)
1350               Talk by Dr. Yuan Feng (Tsinghua): Characterizing locally indistinguishable orthogonal product states (See abstract below)
1450               Panel Discussion on Interaction between Physics and Computer Science.
1530               Coffee/Discussion/Posters
1600               Continuation of Panel Discussion.
1800               Dinner (for those who would like to accompany invited speakers and organizers for informal discussions at dinner, if you would like to join us, please let me (nvk) know)

The talks will be held in the Nisbet Room, David Russell Apartments, Buchanan Gardens, University of St Andrews, KY16 9LY. Please register by Thursday 16/10/2008 by emailing nvk at st-andrews dot ac dot uk with the heading, "QUISCO Meeting 24/10/2008". Attendance is free. Poster JPEG PDF

Professor Barry Sanders
Dr Barry Sanders is iCORE Chair of Quantum Information Science and Director of the Institute for Quantum Information Science at the University of Calgary. He is especially well known for seminal contributions to theories of quantum-limited measurement, highly nonclassical light, practical quantum cryptography, and optical implementations of quantum information tasks. His current research interests include quantum resources and also optical and atomic implementations of quantum information tasks and protocols.

Dr. Sanders is a Fellow of the Institute of Physics (U.K.), the Optical Society of America, the Australian Institute of Physics, and the American Physical Society, a past President of the Australian Optical Society, current Secretary-Treasurer of the American Physical Society Topical Group on Quantum Information, Concepts, and Computation, a member of the American Institute of Physics Education Advisory Committee, and an editorial board member for both Physical Review A and the New Journal of Physics. In addition, Dr. Sanders serves on numerous conference committees for the American Physical Society, the International Society for Optical Engineering (SPIE), the Optical Society of America, and various quantum information conferences.

Professor John Rarity
Prior to moving to the University of Bristol in 2001, Rarity worked as a physicist at the Defence Evaluation and Research Agency (DERA) arm of the UK Ministry of Defence.

Notable early achievements while at DERA included demonstrations of quantum interference and non-locality over large distances, demonstrating a violation of Bell's Inequality over 4km of optical fibre in 1994. These experiments were followed by work in quantum cryptography, resulting in his team at DERA setting a world record of 1.9 km range for free space secure quantum cryptography[2]. A collaboration with Ludwig-Maximilian University, Munich in 2002 successfully demonstrated an open air quantum cryptography experiment over a distance of 23.4km.

Since moving to the University of Bristol, Professor Rarity has built up a substantial group working in experimental quantum optics. One project which has received substantial publicity recently in collaboration with the Quantum Information Processing group at HP Labs is developing affordable quantum key distribution systems. The scheme reduces the cost by using pulsed LEDs rather than lasers for the source of transmitted qubits.

In 2007 Professor Rarity has also collaborated in a demonstration of quantum key distribution using free space optical communications over 144 km between the islands of Tenerife and La Palma.

Dr. Yuan Feng
Talk Abstract: The paper by Bennett et al. [C. H. Bennett et al, Phys. Rev. A 59, 1070 (1999).] identified a set of orthogonal product states in the Hilbert space H(3)xH(3) such that reliably distinguishing those states requires nonlocal quantum operations. While more examples have been found for this counter-intuitive ``nonlocality without entanglement'' phenomenon, a complete and computationally verifiable characterization for all such sets of states remains unknown. In this paper, we give such characterizations for the spacese C(3)xC(3) and C(2)xC(2)xC(2). As a consequence, we show that in both spaces, there is no additional set of a fundamentally different structure than those of the known instances.