George Gilder, President of Gilder Publishing, LLC, Chair of George Gilder/Forbes Telecosm Conference 

Abstract:

The Rise of Exaflood Optics
Optics is now in its exaflood stage: with hundreds of exabytes of data swarming around worldwide webs of glass and light. An exabyte is 10 to the 18th, a billion gigabytes, a million billion big books of text or fifty thousand textual Libraries of Congress, enough to satisfy the reading needs of the world’s population for a century. Or one exabyte is just a hundred million high definition movies, hardly enough to satisfy a million teenagers for a year. For the past two decades has raged a war between the rise of Exaflood optics with its video tides and the persistence of a communications infrastructure based on vocal and textual trickles. The trickleware has all gone mobile and wireless. Today the planetary utility of optical glass increasingly carries high definition images, virtual worlds, games, and telephonic telepresence, in a global sensorium, pushing the system toward the Zettabyte era of 10 to 21st. This requires a new optical architecture. It’s first manifestations are inclement and cloudy for the industry. Most optics companies are following an uncreative, modular strategy, fitting components into existing systems.  The real opportunity in optics is to create entirely new systems that adapt to a new age of optical entanglement appropriate to the age of telepresence. Don't solve problems, pursue opportunities.

"The Coming Capacity Crunch"

Andrew Chraplyvy, Bell Labs, Alcatel-Lucent

Abstract:  

 Because the transmission capacity of optical fibers was seemingly limitless, the unabated exponential growth of demand was viewed as lucrative business opportunities by carriers, service providers, and equipment manufacturers alike. However recent information-theoretic studies have concluded that the capacity of conventional fiber optic systems is not as limitless as had been thought, and in fact that the "end" could be in sight. Scientists and engineers are now struggling to squeeze the last few doublings of capacity out of optical fibers using a variety of techniques, in particular by implementing complex modulation formats. But what then?

"Quantum Information: The next frontier"

Prof. Anton Zeilinger, Vienna University

Abstract:

For a long time the conceptually challenging predictions of quantum physics for individual experiments have been the issue of such bizarre discussions as Schrödinger’s cat gedanken experiment.

There, quantum superposition would imply the co-existence of the states of a live cat and a dead cat, quantum randomness would imply the fundamental unpredictability of the results of an observation of the cat's real and factual properties, and entanglement means that the state of the cat, dead or alive, is entangled with the state of an radioactive atom.

Interestingly these same concepts, randomness, superposition, and entanglement, have become cornerstone concepts in a new quantum information technology. The most important applications are quantum cryptography, quantum computation, and quantum teleportation.

Quantum cryptography permits the encoding of confidential information in a way that its security against eavesdropping is guaranteed by the laws of physics. A quantum computer would be able to operate in a quantum superposition of many different states thus enabling exponential speedup for some problems. Quantum teleportation allows transferring directly the quantum state of an individual system onto a distant one thus providing an ideal way for quantum computers to communicate with each other.