John von Neumann was one of the exceptional scientists of the 20th century. To celebrate the 120th anniversary of von Neumann’s birth, the John von Neumann Society has prepared a series of commemorative events in 2023. One of them was a Hungarian Neumann conference on this Wednesday, November 15, jointly organized by the Neumann Társaság and the HUN-REN SZTAKI (HUN-REN Institute for Computer Science and Control).

The organizers wrote the following about the goals of the conference: “John Neumann’s 1955 article, ‘Can We survive technology?’ – has never been more relevant than today. We see that humanity is an interdependent community – and we know that inevitable progress has its risks. Instead of anxiety, let us look at how science, and IT in particular, can help us meet the challenges of the future. Cloud, quantum technology, IT – and green solutions… We believe that IT thinking and IT solutions can help make our future liveable. We have no other choice: “patience, flexibility, intelligence. Considered technooptimism – after Neumann, freely.”

The “After Neumann, freely” Conference has focused on different aspects of future trends

Laszlo Bacsardi (Budapest University of Techology and Economics) was invited to give a talk about quantomcomputing and quantumcommunication. In his presentation titled ‘Evolving quantum technology: from quantum computers to the quantum internet’, he had the opportunity to show the importance the quantumtechnology, provide an overview of the activities of the Quantum Information National Laboratory of Hungary, detail the Hungarian plans of the QCIHungary consortium for EuroQCI as well as discuss some of our results with fiber-based and free-space quantum key distribution at BME Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Informatics.