Happy birthday to us

The Centre for Quantum Technologies has just turned six. We celebrated on 6 December with a special symposium at Singapore's Asian Civilisations Museum with three scientific talks by distinguished visiting scientists and a CQT Principal Investigator, then a birthday dinner for CQT's researchers and staff.

CQT's annual event is called by tradition "The Famous, the Bit and the Quantum". With no intention to assign any of the speakers to any of the labels, the talks this year were:

• "Superconducting Circuits for Quantum Information Processing: How Electric Circuits Behave Quantum Mechanically"
  Yasunobu Nakamura, Research Center for Advanced Science and technology (RCAST), The University of Tokyo, Center for Emergent Matter Science (CEMS), RIKEN
• "Simulating Quantum Behaviour with Quantum Computers"
  Richard Cleve, University of Waterloo
• "Make It Small and Take It Outside!"
  Alexander Ling, Centre for Quantum Technologies, NUS

This part of our birthday party was open to the public, and we were pleased to welcome some people from outside our quantum world to learn about what we do. We thank the speakers for their entertaining and thought-provoking talks. Abstracts are available here.

The birthday dinner that followed was CQTians' chance to celebrate another successful year – not just in terms of problems solved, papers published and grants won, but for CQT remaining a welcoming and vibrant place to work.

The CQTian of the Year award, which was founded by CQT's Director to recognise exceptional contributions by CQTians to the spirit of the place, was this year presented to members of the Centre's welfare committee, the O2 team. Members of the O2 are volunteers who organise social events, including the birthday dinner and activities ranging from movie nights to walking the Southern Ridges. Previous CQTian of the Year awards were presented to Evon Tan and Swee Yee Wee (Auntie).

The 2013 CQTian of the Year award was shared by members of the O2 committee, shown here with their certificates. Pictured from left to right are Imran, Jessie, Evon (Chair of the committee and nominator of the team), Lay Hua, Mashitah, Irene, and Ethan.