The 871st WE-Heraeus Seminar, titled Input, Output, Insight: Inference from Black Boxes – Contextuality, Bell Inequalities, and Beyond, will take place at the Physikzentrum Bad Honnef, Germany, between 14.10.2026 and 17.10.2026.
This seminar will bring together experts working on various forms of system-agnostic methods in quantum information, including contextuality, communication matrices, device-independent cryptography, and other approaches in which quantum devices are treated as uncharacterized black boxes with inputs and outputs.
Participants will come from both academia and industry, including early-career researchers and PhD students. The goal of the seminar is to discuss and compare different methods, encourage cross-pollination of ideas, and explore recent theoretical progress and applications in quantum computing, quantum key distribution, and related areas.
Invited speakers include:
- Adán Cabello, University of Seville, Spain
- Péter Frenkel, Alfréd Rényi Institute of Mathematics, Hungary
- Mariami Gachechiladze, TU Darmstadt, Germany
- Markus Müller, Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information, Austria
- Victoria Wright, Quantinuum, UK
- Zhen-Peng Xu, Anhui University, China
- Sixia Yu, University of Science and Technology of China
and others.
The registration and submission deadline is 5.7.2026. Participants may apply to present their work in the form of a contributed talk or poster.
There is no fee for participants: the conference fee, accommodation, and meals will be fully covered by the Wilhelm and Else Heraeus Foundation. Participants are responsible only for their own travel expenses.
The seminar is organized by Martin Plávala and René Schwonnek.
