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The conference has started. The venue is one of the most impressive hotel’s I’ve ever been in, reminds me a bit of the Layer Cake country house.

I’ve already seen some interesting areas that I’d like to peruse when my work on Quantum Walk’s is done. In particular, quantum complexity theory (QMA) has caught my eye. The poster session has been a great eye opener too; the field of QIP is quite diverse, from very abstract math, to experiments with lasers.

One of the feature speakers pulled out, and Christian Kurtsiefer gave a lecture in his place. Christian’s work on QKD hacks featured at DEFCON17. I got chatting to him about the comparisons between an academic conference like QIP and hacking conferences like 27c3 and DEFCON.

I think one of the fundamental differences between academic and hacker conferences is the level of participation, curiosity and application. Please keep in mind that the following views have been my own experiences, and are not supposed to be a stereotyping or generalisation of either community.

The poster session at QIP has shown that a very high proportion of attendees (50%+) are creating new work, actively pushing the boundaries of what is currently known in the field. At hacker conferences, I feel there is a much smaller proportion of people who do genuinely ground-breaking, new work (like Dan Kaminski, or Travis Goodspeed). Most of the audience are hobbyists, they will take a look at someone else’s work and play with it, but (in my experience) the majority don’t create substantially new work of note. How many people who have seen a GSM talk by Harald Welte or Chris Paget will be able to present a new finding on GSM in the next year? How many people who know what rainbow tables are will enter “Crack Me If You Can” next year?

However, the hacker community are a group of individuals with a wider and more varied curiosity, they often have a wealth of knowledge outside their area of expertise. I feel there is a much strong lust for information and knowledge in the hacker community. Hacker conferences are more fun, with games like Hacker Jeopardy, music events (DJ sets, chip-tunes concerts), and capture the flag style tournaments.

I think both communities can learn from the other. It would be nice to see more work coming out of the hacker community, or even a way to publicise what individual’s are working on. A poster session would be a nice way to do this. Likewise, academic communities may benefit if their member’s broadened their scope of interests, paving the way to greater collaboration.