  We present an adiabatic approach to the design of entangling quantum
operations with two electron spins localized in separate InAs/GaAs quantum dots
via the Coulomb interaction between optically-excited localized states.
Slowly-varying optical pulses minimize the pulse noise and the relaxation of
the excited states. An analytic "dressed state" solution gives a clear physical
picture of the entangling process, and a numerical solution is used to
investigate the error dynamics. For two vertically-stacked quantum dots we show
that, for a broad range of dot parameters, a two-spin state with concurrence
$C>0.85$ can be obtained by four optical pulses with durations $\sim 0.1 - 1$
ns.
