  The construction and operation of large scale quantum information devices
presents a grand challenge. A major issue is the effective control of coherent
evolution, which requires accurate knowledge of the system dynamics that may
vary from device to device. We review strategies for obtaining such knowledge
from minimal initial resources and in an efficient manner, and apply these to
the problem of characterization of a qubit embedded into a larger state
manifold, made tractable by exploiting prior structural knowledge. We also
investigate adaptive sampling for estimation of multiple parameters.
