A massive effort spanning many hundreds of research groups and coming from multiple disparate disciplines is underway to build a robust large scale quantum computer.  In this program, David Bacon, University of Washington, discusses his research into the theory of fault-tolerant quantum computation as well as into the study of the algorithmic power of quantum computers. Bacon highlights methods for achieving fault-tolerant quantum computation that are remarkably similar to how fault-tolerance is achieved in classical computers. He discusses the similarities and differences between quantum and classical computers and describes how these differences have lead to new quantum algorithms for classically hard problems. From the Series:CSE Colloquia - 2006