The Canadians are coming

The list of accepted papers for FOCS has just been published. There appear to be 6 quantum related papers.

1. Two-message quantum interactive proofs are in PSPACE
   Rahul Jain, Sarvagya Upadhyay and John Watrous.
2. Span programs and quantum query complexity: The general adversary bound is nearly tight for every boolean function
   Ben Reichardt.
3. Optimal quantum strong coin flipping
   André Chailloux and Iordanis Kerenidis.
4. The Quantum and Classical Complexity of Translationally Invariant Tiling and Hamiltonian Problems
   Sandy Irani and Daniel Gottesman.
5. Universal Blind Quantum Computation
   Anne Broadbent, Joseph Fitzsimons and Elham Kashefi.
6. A Probabilistic Inequality with Applications to Threshold Direct Product Theorems
   Falk Unger.

So what's notable about this list (aside from the fact that I'm on it)? Take a look at the authors. Four of the six accepted papers have Waterloo affiliated authors. I count 7 current affiliations to either IQC or PI, out of 12 authors, and Elham has spent time at IQC in the past. If any proof were needed that IQC lives up to its promise its the above list. Try to imagine one institute producing 2/3 of the papers in Nature or Science. Hard, no?