It's listed here. Pretty much all the talks were recorded with some of them, unfortunately, not having audio because we decided to skimp and did it on the cheap with a few students who were not as proficient as, I hope, the professional we have in the back there. So this time around, we went expensive, and hopefully it will pay off.

Now, if you do not want your talk to be recorded, and several people have indicated that, do let me know, and we'll simply not record it. But otherwise, all the talks will be recorded and will be made available after the meeting is over.

There are a couple of new features this time. We decided to have two best student paper prize talks, and those will happen Tuesday morning. We had quite a few submissions, and our advisory board generously helped us in selecting what we thought were the top two talks.

So those will be presented on Tuesday morning, half-hour slots, there will be one theory and one experiment talk. We will also have, as a new feature, a panel discussion on theory versus experiment in quantum error correction, and that will happen on Thursday afternoon. The moderator will be Mark Bird, who's one of the core organizers of this event.

And finally, we will have a tour of the D-Wave 1 Rainier chip, which is being installed at ISI, which is our off-campus location in Marina del Rey, not from the airport. I sent out an email last night asking people to indicate whether they're interested

in taking the tour. The reason this happened was that several people contacted me ahead of the meeting and asked if they could go and see the box. It's an interesting box to look at, and you can also look inside. There is a very, very small chance that we will actually be able to have it up and running

and run some simulations or some demos for you. That should be interesting. Sergio Boixo is, I don't know if he's here yet, but he's working hard on making that happen. And by the way, your suggestions for what to run on the chip are very welcome, seriously.

If anybody has anything they'd like to try out, we're more than open to doing that. So if you want to take the tour, there will be a shuttle, and that leaves, there's a regular shuttle that leaves from USC to ISI. You could use that to go almost all the way to the airport, or if you don't need to go

to the airport, then you can come back here. There's a shuttle that will take you back. Finally, some administrative things. We had a last-minute schedule switch, so the tutorials, Andrew Landl will go before Robert Rassendorf. Lunch is up in the vineyard room.

And the poster session is two floors up from here, right up the stairs as you go, and the posters need to be set up this evening at the end of the last session at six. If you have a poster, please go and set it up there, and then the poster sessions will actually start tomorrow and last until Thursday.

And finally, if you need any assistance with any administrative issues, Anita Fung or Lamia Dabbouni are at the front desk and can help you out. If you haven't registered yet, they will be there the whole morning and probably also later, and so any registration can take up with them.

Okay, so now, four years ago, I was a lot smarter than this time because I did not volunteer myself to give a talk, and this time I did. And so I did not have time to prepare any serious introductory remarks, and so I hope you will not find it really obnoxious of me to ask you to listen to a four-minute

video clip from four years ago, which were my introductory remarks then. This is the advantage of having a recording. And actually, I checked this out. I was hoping that it would be appropriate, and I realized that I was just going to say the very same thing. I don't think I could say it again as eloquently as I said then.

So here we go, four minutes. So I thought I'd start with a little bit of historical background. Back in the Stone Age, about 10, 15 years ago, there was a lot of pessimism on the

viability of quantum computation, and there were prominent critics such as Rolf Landauer, who wrote an influential paper in 1995 with the title, Is Quantum Mechanics Useful? And in fact, he explained in the introduction that his title was a little sweeping, and he didn't really mean to critique all of quantum mechanics, but in fact, his target

was really quantum computation. This was shortly after the publication of Shor's algorithm. So Landauer made the important observations that quantum computation was likely to be very fragile. In particular, he pointed out that the computation is likely to suffer from localization, by

which he meant something like Anderson localization, and that's not an issue that's received a lot of attention in the quantum computing literature. But then his second point was that quantum computation might suffer from the following problem. Additionally, small errors, he wrote, will accumulate and cause the computation to go

off track. And now this was a very insightful critique, which, of course, has to do with decoherence, and Landauer went on to say, make some qualitative statements to this effect. And he inspired some additional works, for example, a paper by Bill Unruh, which was

published in the same year, in which he acknowledges Landauer's insights into this issue. And Unruh decided to make a calculation to check whether quantum computers could actually function in the presence of noise. And he writes in the abstract, it is found that for quantum calculations, in which the

maintenance of coherence over a large number of states is important, not only must the coupling be small, but the time taken in the quantum calculation must be less than the thermal time scale, h bar over kt. So he was able to show by analyzing his model that quantum computers would not be able to survive very long.

And in his conclusions, he makes the following statement, the above analysis has given a preliminary look at the effects of decoherence in quantum computers. It suggests that this problem is going to require some serious thought in order to design systems to avoid the disastrous effects that the loss of coherence due to the coupling to the environment can cause.

So serious thought was indeed required, and fortunately, it didn't take very long. And in 1995, same year, Peter Shor, and then shortly followed by Andrew Steen, published papers which showed for the first time the viability of quantum computing in the presence of decoherence, and their insight was to use quantum error correcting codes.

So Shor's paper, entitled Scheme for Reducing Decoherence in Quantum Computing Memory, pointed out, let me read again from the abstract, it has shown how to reduce the effects of decoherence for information stored in memory, assuming that the decoherence process acts independently on each of the bits stored in memory.

This involves the use of a quantum analog of error correcting codes. So critical insight, which was then also pointed out by Andrew Steen in his, I would say almost companion paper to Shor's paper, Error Correcting Codes in Quantum Theory,

Steen wrote, a natural link is then revealed between basic quantum theory and the linear error correcting codes of classical information theory. So Shor and Steen set the scene for what was to come, and what was to come is going to be talked about a lot at this conference, so I'm looking forward greatly to hearing

about all the most recent developments in the subject. So let me, that's it, I hope these remarks are still pertinent. And with that, I would like to open QSC 11 and invite my co-organizer, Todd Brown, to give the floor.

Excuse me. Yes. I'm recording, I'm recording. Adam Finidum. A nested series of screens.