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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.

I’ve been in Singapore over 24 hours now and I’m shattered. Only getting sleep in 3-4 hour sessions, hopefully it’ll all be ironed out by Monday when the conference starts.

Sentosa, the Island I’m staying on, is beautiful, and there’s a ton of stuff to do, for everyone (kids, couples, a group of lads up for a session), from nice restaurants, to theme parks, beaches to golf. There seems to be quite a few Australian couples and family’s staying in this hotel.

A few things have caught my attention so far.

• Singapore drives on the left like the UK & Ireland. The most popular bands of car are Japanese (Honda, Mitsubishi, Toyota) and German (Mercedes Benz, BMW).
• I’ve spoken with 15-20 locals, mostly shopkeepers, bus drivers, taxi drivers, the hotel staff. The quality of English among those of Indian decent is perfect, those of Chinese/Malay decent have poor to no English. One bus driver had 4 words of English, of which the most common were “Sorry”, “English” and “No”.
• Busses are very frequent, and every stop services multiple lines (some 20+). Fares are based on distance travelled. Most people are using RFID cards to swipe on/off the bus. I haven’t found a way to pay for a transfer to another line using cash. The average trip costs ~€0.75.
• The sports at the university that were people were playing were soccer and rugby.
• High street shopping contains many brands familiar to one shopping in Dublin or London: Topman/Topshop, Pull and Bear, Esprit, Quicksilver, River Island, United Colors of Benetton, GAP, Lacoste, Marks & Spencer, Starbucks, The Body Shop, Prada, Giorgio Armani, Louis Vuitton, Dior, Dolce & Gabbana, and Bvlgari. There are also some brands I recognise but have never seen their brick and mortar stores before, like Patek Philippe, Cartier and The National Geographic.
• The internet connection in the hotel is decent. A Flash speed-test tells me I have a 11Mbps up/1Mbps down connection to a server in .sg. Blacknight’s flash test tells me I’m 1.2Mbps down/800Kbps upto Ireland. Blacknigh’s VoIP results are: 0% packet loss and 0.2% jitter. MTR to Google and Skynet.
• Internet is important here. Every ad I’ve seen has a “Find out fan page on Facebook” link, or the equivalent (I’m sure) in Chinese/Malay. M1 are advertising fibre heavily. 100Mbps synchronous fibre is apparently available to students for ~€23 a month. A 1Gbps synchronous connection costs ~€240 per month.
• Microsoft and the Singaporean government are the major players in TV, though MediaCorp and XINMSN. NewsCorp doesn’t have much of a footing.

Two of the retail staff of Indian decent I was chatting two showed a keen interest in Ireland, I was surprised by their level of knowledge. One was a shopkeeper in a news-agency, the other a tailor. Both knew of the Irish financial crises, both knew the name Anglo, and the tailor had a more in-depth knowledge of the public’s view of Cowen, Lenihan’s sickness, and NAMA. This was more than the information one could glean from the Economist, I suspect either Ireland pops up in the news here a lot, or there are many chatty Irish people here.

I picked up my poster today too, and promptly spilled coffee on it (it’s vinyl and wiped clean). Patrick Hayden’s tutorial on Information theory via decoupling was interesting.