INSIGHTS IN TECHNOLOGY TALKS with Gilles Brassard
10:00-12:30 | University of Zurich, downtown Zurich (The Art of Secret Communication in a Quantum World)
17:00-21:00 | Schaffhausen Institute of Technology, Schaffhausen (Was Einstein right after all?)
Gilles Brassard
University of Montreal, Canada
Professor of computer science and Canada Research Chair at the Université de Montréal, Gilles Brassard FRS, O.C., O.Q., laid the foundations of quantum cryptography at a time when only a handful of people worldwide were interested in quantum information science.
He is also among the inventors of quantum teleportation, a universally recognized pillar of the entire discipline for which Thomson Reuters has predicted that he will one day receive the Nobel Prize in Physics. Editor-in-Chief for Journal of Cryptology from 1991 until 1997, he is the author of three books that have been translated into eight languages. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of London, the Royal Society of Canada, the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research and the International Association for Cryptologic Research. Among his many awards, we note the NSERC Gerhard Herzberg Canada Gold Medal for Science and Engineering and the Killam Prize for natural sciences, which are the two most prestigious science recognitions in Canada.
He was awarded honorary doctorates by the ETH in Zürich, the University of Ottawa and the Università della Svizzera italiana in Lugano, and made an Officer of the Order of Canada and of the Ordre national du Québec. In 2018, he became the first Canadian to receive the Wolf Prize for Physics. Last year, he was awarded the Micius Quantum Prize.
Dr Serguei Beloussov
Chairman of the Board, Founder of SIT
Entrepreneur and business executive with an outstanding 24-year track record of building, growing, and leading high-performing, multi-national high-tech companies in North America, Europe, and Asia.
Recognized as an innovator and thought the leader in the fields of virtualisation, data center automation, and cloud computing, SB is a frequent speaker at industry events around the world. SB has led more than 200 patents and has an h-index of 37.
SB is currently focused full-time on Acronis, the company he founded and returned to as a CEO. Acronis is a global leader in cyber protection, has enjoyed rapid growth and is very profitable, generating hundreds of millions of US$ in revenue.
SB is also dedicated to supporting innovation, and the development of science and education. He co-founded Qwave Capital venture fund, which was created for support of advanced quantum technologies.
SB is a Member of the Advisory Council of Innopolis. Innopolis University has already become an educational leader, featuring best practices from more than 100 teams of world-renowned professors and researchers.
University of Zürich, 71 Rämistrasse
Aula lecture hall (KOL-G-201)
10:00 – 10:30 Welcome coffee and snacks
10:30 – 10:45 Welcome address
Prof. Harald C. Gall, Dean of the Faculty of Economics and Informatics of the University of Zurich
10:45 – 11:15 "Future of computing"
Dr Serguei 'SB' Beloussov, SIT founder and Chairman of the Board, CEO of Acronis
Moore's Law is Not Forever - Real-world Problems Need Better Computers. Future of Computing is happening now: New Physics + New Computing = New Business.
11:15 – 12:15 "The Art of Secret Communication in a Quantum World"
Prof. Gilles Brassard, University of Montreal, Canada
Although practised as an art and science for ages, cryptography had to wait until the mid-twentieth century before Claude Shannon gave it a strong mathematical foundation. However, Shannon's approach was rooted in his own information theory, itself inspired by the classical physics of Newton and Einstein. When quantum theory is taken into account, new vistas open up both for codemakers and codebreakers. Is this a blessing or a curse for the protection of privacy? As we shall see, the jury is still out!
This talk does not assume any prior knowledge of cryptography or quantum theory.
12:15 – 12:30 Q&A
The event is organised by Schaffhausen Institute of Technology, Acronis and the Faculty of Business, Economics and Informatics of the University of Zurich.