Can anyone tell me who this is? Hint: he’s a microwave/RF engineer… I just landed in DC; I’m already failing at my goal of traveling less this semester.

https://www.linkedin.com/events/quantummarketplace-quantumalgor7371555977319395328/ https://sri.zoomgov.com/webinar/register/4817575155269/WN_S6-6jv0MQCiawCZhujgz6g (10 AM - 11:30 AM Central or 11 AM - 12:30 PM Eastern) Not a Zoo (that's a separate rec by Stephen Jordan) but a Zoom. One goal I have is to talk with the moderator before this event... What should I say to influence this event before it happens? Are there any good topics or questions to suggest? The last time him and I spoke was in Vegas in March for an IEEE workshop. I learned something interesting yesterday. I'm taking ECE 763 this semester which is fault-tolerant computing. The old school stuff. We'll read a lot of papers from the 60s and 70s. Yesterday, I introduced myself to the professor for the first time and told him I love his class and I hope to apply some of these principles to universal fault-tolerant quantum computing. He immediately perked up. This kind of shocked me as we hadn't mentioned anything 'quantum' at all in this course and I stealthily was the only 'quantum computing' person in the room as far as I could tell. "Do you know Swamit Tannu he asked me?" I was like yea, I did his course a few years ago. This prof is taking Swamit's course this year (which is more focused on error correction than when I took it). Don't discount the principles learned decades ago as they will help accelerate progress in the next several years. I'll share another tip from going out to dinner with Joe Fitzsimons in 2021, he recommended the book Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins Of The Internet. By the way, Joe's company announced it will go public earlier this week but that's a whole separate discussion.

The first week of August, I spent 8 grueling days at IBM's One Madison Avenue office to attend QSim and its preceding summer school. Halfway through the conference, we got a half day and took the afternoon/evening trip up to Yorktown where I saw Ari for a few minutes between measurements (sadly I couldn't tour Ari's specific part of the lab, but it was great to see him at work!). I've attended all three years QSim has existed. The videos from this year just posted yesterday! https://www.youtube.com/@instituteforrobustquantums7668/videos

Ari might have prompted me to share some of my expertise in "quantum" community events😅... For better or worse, I've gained a rep as the guy in the hat who shows up at all the "quantum" conferences. I'm trying to curtail my travel starting this week, but if I could be anywhere right now, I would have gone to Helsinki (IWQC) or maybe stayed longer in Albuquerque (IEEE/QCE). I don't really look for events anymore; they tend to find me through my network and recommendation algorithms. Here are some of my recs: 1. One of the better lists: https://quantum.info/conf/ 2. 2025 is the "International Year of Quantum": https://quantum2025.org/events/ 3. A great way to get involved at the college club level (as Ari could tell you much more than I) are the upcoming IBM Qiskit Fall Fests: https://www.ibm.com/quantum/blog/qiskit-fall-fest-2025. Sadly, the deadline to apply to host an event has passed, but there will be events going on (mostly in October and November) all over the world. So, there will still be ways to get involved. I have to share that I was at lunch on Tuesday at IEEE with some grad students at UT-Austin. It took us a minute, but the person I sat next to was someone I worked with back in 2022 when I did a weekend trip down to UT for their hackathon for Fall Fest; it was great to reconnect with them. Ari got things rolling strong at UW-Madison in 2023 for UW's first Fall Fest, so much so that IBM featured UW-Madison as the model club during the informational sessions last year. This year, I plan to participate in UW's Fall Fest and help coordinate and give a talk with my friends putting events on at some of the Chicago area universities.