RHUL Cyber CDT Blog

 By Mikaela Brough (CDT in CyberSecurity 2022) From December 11–12, I attended the Cryptology and Social Life Workshop in Trondheim, hosted by the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). I was drawn to this workshop because the attendees comprised a unique academic mix — those whose work touches on, or is at least informed to some extent by, an interest in the socio-political and cultural implications of cryptographic technologies. Among the attendees were both social scientists (e.g., design anthropologists and sociologists) and cryptographers. What made the workshop distinctive was not only the topics of the talks, but the format itself. Each keynote was followed by extended small-group discussions, deliberately set up to bring together people from different disciplinary backgrounds. The result of this was not just a series of presentations, but in-depth conversations across fields that do not always share the same assumptions, methods, or vocabularies.  In my...

  The annual IEEE Quantum Week is one of the largest global convocations of quantum technology researchers, developers, and policymakers from across government, industry, and academia. Its sixth iteration, held from 31 August–5 September 2025 in Albuquerque, New Mexico (USA) reflected a mood of accelerating interest and hype around the quantum technologies domain, with especial focus on quantum computing, quantum algorithms, and quantum communications. The last decade has been a transformative one for the maturing of quantum technologies from theoretical curiosities to early-stage commercially experimental applications, and real and important progress has been made across this time. But practical utility is still sharply limited : great hopes and grand claims about the future capabilities of quantum computers in particular run freely in the investment space around quantum technologies, but the actual capacity of current quantum computers—even those publicly available via quantu...