QCtalks 1st Cycle
Date: Jan. 27, 2021 (5:30pm — 6:30pm CET)
Speaker: Koen Bertels
Affiliation: QBee and University of Porto – Faculty of Engineering – Porto – Portugal
Title: Quantum Accelerators – The first objective in Quantum Computing
Abstract: When the transístor was first defined in 1936, it still took around 60 years before we had the VLSI version of it. In Quantum Computing, we are in the pre-transistor phase as we do not know how to make good and scalable qubits. In this talk, we present the full stack of any quantum accelerator we can build, while assuming that the quantum physics community will be able to produce a large number of good qubits. The full stack starts at the application level and goes all the way to the micro-architecture and the quantum Simulator, called QBeeSim to execute the quantum instructions.
Short Bio: Koen Bertels has been active in the Quantum Computing field for the last 9 years. His group was one of the first to define the full stack for any quantum computational device. He currently focuses on the development of quantum accelerators and uses the public domain tools that his team developed over the years to help organisations and companies to develop quantum solutions for their most challenging problems.
Date: Feb. 3, 2021 (5:30pm — 6:30pm CET)
Speaker: Federico Spedalieri
Affiliation: Information Sciences Institute / University of Southern California, USA
Title: Overview of quantum computing and quantum annealing
Abstract: Quantum computing holds the promise of vastly more efficient information processing devices that could revolutionize a wide range of fields. First generation quantum computing devices have been commercially available for a few years, and others are being developed both by industry and government agencies. But how are these machines programmed? In this talk I will give a brief introduction to quantum computing and discuss some of the challenges one encounters when programming these devices, with a particular emphasis on the subclass of quantum annealers.
Short Bio: Dr. Spedalieri obtained his degree of Licenciado en Ciencias Físicas from the University of Buenos Aires (Argentina) in 1994, and his PhD in Physics from the California Institute of Technology in 2003. He worked as a Postdoctoral Scholar at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, and at the EE Department at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is currently a Research Assistant Professor in the Ming-Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computing Engineering and a Research Lead at the Information Sciences Institute of the University of Southern California. Dr. Spedalieri works on several aspects of quantum information, such as bridging the gap between the adiabatic quantum computing model and applications to many different fields (machine learning, scheduling and planning, circuit fault diagnostics, among others). He’s also interested in quantum sensing, that aims at characterizing the ultimate limits imposed by quantum mechanics on practical sensing tasks.
Date: Feb. 17, 2021 (5:30pm — 6:30pm CET)
Speaker: Ryan LaRose
Affiliation: Univ. of Michigan, USA
Title: Cirq for quantum computing research and development
Abstract: Cirq is an open-source Python framework for writing, optimizing, and running quantum programs. In this talk I will demonstrate the basics of Cirq and show advanced features through guided examples. I will then discuss the larger suite of tools for quantum computing research and development which interface with Cirq. Such tools include OpenFermion for chemistry, TensorFlow Quantum for machine learning, and qsim for optimized quantum circuit simulation, as well as third-party libraries.
Short Bio: Ryan LaRose received his undergraduate degree in mathematics and physics from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is currently a PhD candidate at Michigan State University, where his research focuses on quantum algorithms, and a contributor to Cirq and other open-source libraries from Google Quantum AI.
Date: postponed to Feb. 24, 2021 (5:30pm — 6:30pm CET)
Speaker: Frank Leymann,
Affiliation: IAAS, Universität Stuttgart, Germany
Title: The Bitter Truth About Quantum Algorithms in the NISQ Era
Abstract: Implementing a gate-based quantum algorithm on a NISQ device has several challenges that arise from the fact that such devices are noisy and have limited quantum resources. Thus, various factors contributing to the depth and width as well as to the noise of an implementation of a gate-based algorithm must be understood in order to assess whether an implementation will execute successfully on a given NISQ device. We discuss these factors and their impact on algorithm implementations. For example, we will cover state preparation, connectivity, circuit rewriting, and readout. This will help developers in charge of realizing gate-based algorithms on such machines in (i) achieving an executable implementation, and (ii) assessing the success of their implementation on a given machine.
Short Bio: Frank Leymann is a full professor of computer science at University of Stuttgart, Germany. His research interests include software architecture, robustness of highly-distributed applications, middleware, pattern languages, and quantum computing. Frank is co-author of about 500 peer-reviewed papers, about 70 patents, and several industry standards. He is elected member of the Academy of Europe, a fellow of the center for Integrated Quantum Science and Technology (IQST), and Kurt Goedel visiting professor for quantum computing at TU Vienna.
Date: Mar. 03, 2021 (5:30pm — 6:30pm CET)
Speaker: Benjamin Bichsel
Affiliation: ETH Zurich, Switzerland
Title: Silq: High-Level Quantum Programming
Abstract: Silq is a new high-level programming language for quantum computing with a strong static type system, developed at ETH Zürich. This talk will introduce both the standard parts of Silq (which exist analogously in other quantum languages) and the novel language features unique to Silq, which make Silq programs more concise, intuitive, and less error-prone than programs in existing quantum languages.
Silq addresses the fundamental challenge specific to quantum programming that dropping temporary values from the program state requires explicitly applying operations that uncompute these values. To this end, Silq is the first language which supports safe, automatic uncomputation. This enables a new programming paradigm for quantum programs, which can now implicitly drop temporary values, as is standard in classical computation. To ensure physicality of Silq’s semantics, its type system leverages novel annotations to reject unphysical programs.
Short Bio: Benjamin Bichsel is a PhD student at ETH Zürich, supervised by Prof. Martin Vechev. He has led the development of Silq, which is part of a broader effort to bridge the conceptual gap between classical and quantum languages, thus lowering the entrance barrier for non-expert quantum programmers.Beyond quantum programming, his research interests include differential privacy, probabilistic programming, and data privacy for smart contracts.
Date: Mar. 17, 2021 (5:30pm — 6:30pm CET)
Speaker: Thomas Gabor
Affiliation: Institut fur Informatik, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Germany
Title: Towards Quantum Artificial Intelligence
Abstract: Promising areas for near-term quantum applications are computationally expensive, wide-spread, important to practical applications and perhaps noisy in their own right. Artificial intelligence fits those criteria. Promising areas for machine learning applications demand small compact models for large and clearly labeled data sets. Quantum algorithms fit this description. Looks like a perfect match! What is missing? A sound framework for intuitive development of quantum software.
Short Bio: Thomas Gabor is a researcher at the chair for mobile and distributed computing at LMU Munich. As member of the QAR-Lab he is working on quantum software since 2017. His other research interests include artificial intelligence, optimization and other areas of natural computing.