Friday, May 29, 2026

Some Top Quantum Researchers in Japan

 A while ago, I created a blog post on quantum architecture researchers in Japan, mostly young ones and all very good. But I'm often asked more generally about quantum research and researchers in Japan, so here is a list to refer to. Note that it's ordered by Google Scholar h-index (in parentheses; taken when I wrote this blog post -- we're not being scientific here), which is almost inarguably a terrible way to do it, I don't have a better method at hand. h-index and influence in Japan both correlate with longevity and probably with other factors such as gender. (There is also the caveat that not everyone actually curates their Scholar profile, but eyeballing this particular set they look fairly accurate.)

A lot of other factors influence publications and citations, including ability to both publish and speak in English, but conversely non-native Japanese people are at a disadvantage in the gossip and influence network inside Japan, including hearing about and ultimately influencing the creation of funding opportunities, so there are plusses and minuses.

A few important people don't have Google Scholar profiles (at least not public ones), so I have dropped them into this list entirely qualitatively roughly where I think they belong.

(Todai = University of Tokyo)

(Yeah, when you get to the bottom of the list, I've included our own younger people, whom I know better than the younger people in other places. There are a lot more researchers with h-indices in the 10-25 range. I picked some I like. So sue me.)
(I think the top 20 or so on this list is a relatively complete list of the senior people in the field here; if I've forgotten anybody, let me know!)

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Tuesday, March 24, 2026

Quantum Networking: Drafty Internet Drafts

Speaking as an individual contributor, not as chair of the Quantum Internet Research Group:

We have two new very drafty Internet Drafts out:

Timing Regimes in Quantum Networks and their Physical Underpinnings
Get the HTML version, which renders the figures, names and equations right.This one is intended to bridge the physics and the network engineering; there should be no design decisions in this document, but it should tell us how to use the physics to decide. It should be useful across all possible quantum network designs. In particular, I originated the document to help us understand layering in quantum network architectures.

Comments submittable as email (either direct to both authors or on the QIRG mailing list), or as Issues or Pull Requests on GitHub.

A Quantum Network Architecture
This one is the start of the description of our own quantum network architecture. Still very far to go. 

Comments submittable as email (either direct to all three authors or on the QIRG mailing list), or as Issues or Pull Requests on GitHub.

Comments very welcome on both documents!

These two are the start of what we expect to eventually be a full technical description of our network, spanning as many as two dozen documents.

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Voluntary-Participation Surveillance Society and, oh, Little Things Like Aircraft Carriers

 Hilarious, inevitable, tactically troubling, and evidence of our voluntary-participation surveillance society. https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2026/03/20/stravaleaks-france-s-aircraft-carrier-located-in-real-time-by-le-monde-through-fitness-app_6751640_4.html

Strava is the app I use to record my bike rides; "everybody" is on it. It can obscure your start and end points if you don't want the exact location of your house identified, but if you're on a public app like this, you've already volunteered to share a great deal about yourself.

Warfighters are heavily warned against sharing opsec-sensitive info, and I've been told that modern briefings instruct them not to use Strava while on deployment. But it was inevitable that someone would forget. I'm sure the poor guy has already been disciplined and his shipmates won't let him live it down, for sure.
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Friday, March 06, 2026

Dave Farber: Obituaries and Archival Materials



As you know by know, our beloved Professor Dave Farber passed away last month. The impact of his loss will resonate for a long time. Here is my list of articles about his passing, plus a few other things. Let me know if you see other articles that should be included. (Picture above: we cooked Dave turkey on Christmas Day, 2025.)

Perhaps my favorite quote from this set of sources is from Dave Crocker, in the Wall Street Journal:

His mind was, from what I could see, largely undisciplined, which is how he could make these connections so unexpectedly and usefully, but not always usefully. He would say things that put things in juxtaposition because his mind just wandered in various ways.

To me, that's high praise.

Notices from Keio University & Japanese Organizations

Other Employers
Major Newspapers
Trade Organizations
Historical Materials Archived at Keio
Other Historical Materials
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Monday, February 16, 2026

Eulogy for Dave Farber

[Photo is at Miyajima, Hiroshima, on Dave's 90th birthday trip: Keiko Okawa, Yukie Shibuya, Yasuo "tsucchy" Tsuchimoto, Kaori Suzuki, Rod Van Meter, Dave Farber, Jun Murai, Catharina Maracke]


 My comments from Dave Farber's funeral on February 13, 2026:

David Jack Farber.
Born April 17, 1934.
Passed away February 7, 2026.
Occupation: professor.

Those are the basic facts you will see on a census form.

Worked on telephone switching systems, built distributed systems, helped kick off important precursors to today’s Internet, served as chief technologist at the FCC, taught at five universities – those are the things you’ll read in the obituaries in the newspapers, and we heard about them yesterday from Manny, Jun, and Jiro. We heard from Manny about family, and Dan about Dave’s love of food and of Japan. (For those of you who didn’t join us last night, we hope to make the video available later.) And in a few minutes we will hear from Vint Cerf, whose career Dave helped shape.

Dave literally changed the life direction of several Keio students that I know of, and doubtless affected many more in ways I’ll never get to hear about. As a Keio faculty member, I’m deeply grateful for that. After Vint, we will hear from Taro, who is one of those whose life was changed.

So what more is there to say?

If I had to describe Dave, I would pick the 3 Cs: connection, clarity, and curiosity. Yesterday we talked about all three of these.  Dave's ability to connect people might be the true core of his career – it’s the thing that brought us all here today.  Dave was exceptionally clear in his explanation of things – and also saw clearly. Dave’s curiosity was endless; personally, it’s the thing I admired most about him, and he and I had long conversations about wide ranging topics (yes, including quantum computing), and it might be the core of his longevity.

A few days ago, while helping Manny clean up the apartment, we found a number of articles that Dave had printed out for later reading. I found a couple of things I had written on Dave’s desk – my blog entry on web3, and my class and research group policy on the use of AI. That's certainly an example of his curiosity.

Dave was not a particularly religious person, though he was proud of his Jewish heritage. G.G. was raised Greek Orthodox. I was raised American Baptist. One place where all of these things overlap is in the Book of Ecclesiastes (which, by the way, takes its English Christian name from the Greek). Ecclesiastes is known as Kohelet (which I’m sure I’m not pronouncing right) in Hebrew.

So, with your permission, I’d like to read a little from the King James Version of Ecclesiastes. It will be a familiar passage, and it’s one that’s often used in Christian funerals, at least in America, but it should resonate with everyone regardless of religion, I hope.

3 To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:
2 A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;
3 A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up;
4 A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
5 A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
6 A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away;
7 A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
8 A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.

Dave knew all of these things. Dave did most of them rather frequently. We have done about half of these things just in this last week, talking about Dave and preparing for today.

Dave was much more than a colleague and mentor. Dave was my friend, and I will miss him.

My condolences again to Manny, Mei, Carol, Nate and Sam. Thank you for sharing Dave with the rest of us. May his memory be a blessing.

Go in peace, Dave.  G.G. and Joe are waiting for you.


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Friday, January 16, 2026

TDC toolkit new release!

 If anybody out there is using our Multiharp toolkit for counting photons, a new release is out:

https://crates.io/crates/tdc_toolkit
https://docs.rs/tdc_toolkit/latest/tdc_toolkit/multiharp/device/struct.MH160DeviceConfig.html
https://github.com/moonshot-nagayama-pj/tdc_toolkit

Thanks to Andrew and the rest of the team who do the hard work!
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Tuesday, December 30, 2025

Breakthroughs of the Years

 Since 1996, Science magazine has named a single "Breakthrough of the Year" as well as several runners-up. This year's is the growth of renewable energy, especially solar. But what about the past thirty years, can we see any themes or a bigger picture? Here is a quick look at the categories, as roughly laid out by me:

  • Life sciences: 17
    • Human health: 8
      • HIV (understanding, treatment as prevention, lenacapavir): 3
      • Cancer (immunotherapy): 1
      • Other (stem-cell therapy, genetic variation, COVID-19 vaccine, GLP-1): 4
    • Evolution (evo in action, Ardipithecus ramidus): 2
    • Other bio/life sciences (cloning Dolly, whole-genome sequencing, RNA interference, reprogramming, CRISPR, single-cell sequencing, AlphaFold): 7
  • The physical universe: 9
    • Cosmology and "deep" astronomy (accelerating universe, dark energy, gravitational waves, neutron star merger, black hole VLBI, JWST): 6
    • Exploring the solar system (Spirit, Rosetta): 2
    • Particle physics (Higgs): 1
  • Technology: 3
    • Nano/quantum tech (nanocircuits, quantum machine): 2
    • Energy tech: 1
  • Mathematics (Poincaré proof): 1
That's thirty years of astounding science, for the benefit of humankind as well as sheer curiosity.

It would be worthwhile to compare to the annual list at Physics World, and also to look at the runners-up and the "busts" of the year, which Science also reports, but that would be more work than I care to put in this morning.

It's humbling to be reminded that quantum information is at best a small corner of the global science and technology effort. Even the broader field of computing, with all it has done in the last thirty years, makes the list above only once, and at that for its contribution in understanding proteins rather than the technology itself. Of course, technology is very often about incremental accumulation of small advances, rather than "breakthroughs". Still, time invested in thinking about where we have been, where we are, and where we are going would be well spent.

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Monday, December 08, 2025

Quantum Curricula

 (Just a quick note for now, more later.)


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