Entangled Things

In Episode 49, Patrick and Ciprian take a look at the Nobel Prize in Physics.The team discuss Entanglement, some of the other scientific achievements that set the stage, and the implications of bringing Quantum topics to the forefront of scientific discussion.

In Episode 48, Patrick and Ciprian speak with returning guest Bob Coecke, Chief Scientist at Quantinuum. Among other topics, the team discuss modern paths into Quantum, the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics, and the possibility of a Quantum Winter.Bob Coecke is Chief Scientist at Cambridge Quantum / Quantinuum.  He also heads the Oxford-based Compositional Intelligence & Quantum NLP team and is Emeritus Professor at Wolfson College, Oxford University. Previously, he was Professor of Quantum Foundations, Logics and Structures at the Computer Science department at Oxford University, where he was for 20 years, and co-founded, built, and led a multi-disciplinary research group of up to 50 people. He supervised 66 PhD students. He pioneered Categorical Quantum Mechanics (now in AMS's MSC2020 classification), ZX-calculus, DisCoCat natural language meaning, mathematical foundations for resource theories, Quantum Natural Language Processing, and is co-author of Picturing Quantum Processes, a book providing a fully diagrammatic treatment of quantum theory and its applications. He co-authored close to 200 research papers. He's a founding father of the QPL (Quantum Physics and Logic) and ACT (Applied Category Theory) communities, the diamond open access journal Compositionality, and Cambridge University Press' Applied Category Theory book series. He was the first person to have Quantum Foundations as part of his professorial title. His work headlined in various media outlets, including Forbes, New Scientist, PhysicsWorld, ComputerWeekly. 

In Episode 47, Patrick speaks with Dakshita Khurana of the University of Illinois.Among other topics, the team discuss theoretical cryptography, multiparty computation, and simulation in cryptography.Dakshita Khurana received a B. Tech. in Electrical Engineering (Power) from IIT Delhi in 2012 and a PhD in Computer Science from UCLA in 2018. She was a postdoctoral researcher at Microsoft from 2018-19 before joining UIUC as an Assistant Professor in 2019.  Her research focuses on theoretical cryptography. She has contributed to the foundations of cryptographic protocols, including to privacy-preserving proof systems, and to preventing man-in-the-middle attacks. Her more recent work investigates the foundations of quantum cryptography. Her research has been recognized as a long plenary talk at QIP and been published by invitation at the SIAM Journal on Computing.  Dakshita's research has been funded through grants from the NSF and DARPA, and gifts from Visa Research, C3AI and Jump Arches. She was named to the Forbes List of 30 under 30 in Science. She was also a Google Research Fellow at the Simons Institute, Berkeley. Previously, her thesis work was recognized with a UCLA Dissertation Year Fellowship, a UCLA CS Outstanding Graduating PhD Award and Graduate Student Research Awards from Symantec and CISCO. 

In Episode 46, Patrick and Ciprian speak with Diana Franklin of the University of Chicago.Among other topics, the team discuss K-12 education in Quantum, suspension of disbelief, and ways to communicate Quantum topics to broader audiences.Diana Franklin is an Associate Professor in Computer Science at the University of Chicago. When she received her Ph.D. at UC Davis, 2002, her research focus was computer architecture, especially new technologies. She has done research in intelligent memories, memristors, and quantum computers. In 2008, she began her transition to computer science education research. She now leads the CANON (Computing for ANyONe) Lab, specializing in both 3rd-8th grade computer science interventions and quantum computing education for novices of any age with a particular focus towards moving towards more equitable learning experiences. She is currently the co-lead of the Q-12 Partnership, a new initiative by the Office of Science and Technology Programs, the National Science Foundation, industry, and professional organizations to bootstrap K-12 quantum information science education. In addition, she serves on the CRA (Computing Research Association) Board and is the author of "A Practical Guide to Gender Diversity for CS Faculty," from Morgan Claypool. Zines: https://www.epiqc.cs.uchicago.edu/zinesOther resources:https://www.epiqc.cs.uchicago.edu/resourcesInfo about quantum games:  https://www.canonlab.org/quanderCANON research lab with classical CS resources: http://canonlab.orgInterested in participating in a quantum activity in a K-12 classroom during World Quantum Day on April 14th? Quantime will have activities posted for middle and high school classrooms with no expectations of teacher background in QIS. https://q12education.org/quantime

In Episode 45, Patrick and Ciprian speak with returning guest Elisabetta Valiante of 1QBit.Among other topics, the team discuss the need to create a standard benchmark for quantum computers, and the varying approaches of private business and the public sector.Elisabetta Valiante has been a member of the Optimization Solutions Team at 1QBit since 2018. She is experienced in optimization problems in chemistry, biochemistry, and finance, as well as benchmarking quantum and quantum-inspired optimization algorithms and hardware. Elisabetta graduated in Physics in her home country at the Sapienza University of Rome. She earned a PhD from the Ludwig Maximilian University with a dissertation on galaxy evolution, and had postdoctoral appointments at the University of British Columbia and Cardiff University. She was the leader of the first major world data release of the Herschel Astrophysical Terahertz Large Area Survey (H-ATLAS). Elisabetta has published and co-authored scientific articles in peer-reviewed journals, and has presented at many international conferences (for example, the XXIX International Astronomical Union General Assembly) and colloquia.A passionate mentor, she recently participated in the “Girls and STEAM” event at Science World in Vancouver, BC.Elisabetta currently resides in Vancouver, BC with her partner and her cat.

In Episode 44, Patrick and Ciprian take a retrospective look at Entangled Things.The team discuss the journey so far, the excitement and challenges of podcasting, and the joy of gaining and sharing knowledge of guests from within the industry.

In Episode 43, Patrick and Ciprian speak regarding Microsoft Quantum advancements.Among other topics, the team discuss Azure Quantum, languages, and intergrations with other existing hardware and software platforms.

In Episode 42, Patrick and Ciprian speak with returning guest Noson Yanofsky, of Brooklyn College.The team discuss the algorithms of quantum, error correction, resilience, and np and np complete problems.Noson S. Yanofsky has a Ph.D. in mathematics from The Graduate Center of The City University of New York. He held a post-doctoral research position in McGill University in Montreal. Currently, he is a professor of computer science at Brooklyn College and The Graduate Center. In addition to writing research papers, he has authored Quantum Computing for Computer Scientists with Mirco Mannucci (Cambridge University Press), The Outer Limits of Reason: What Science, Mathematics, and Logic Cannot Tell Us (MIT Press), and Theoretical Computer Science for the Working Category Theorist (accepted for publication by Cambridge University Press). He is currently working on a book titled Monoidal Categories: A Unifying Concept in Mathematics, Physics, and Computers. Noson lives in Brooklyn with his wife and four children.To hear more from Noson, please check out his book, Quantum Computing for Computer Scientists, or his many other publications.Links to the books can be found here. http://www.sci.brooklyn.cuny.edu/~noson/

In Episode 41, Patrick and Ciprian speak with returning guest Fred Chong of the University of Chicago. Among other topics, the team discuss the acquisition of Super.tech by ColdQuanta, the benefits of software development companies working directly with hardware manufacturers, and neutral atom architecture.Fred Chong is the Seymour Goodman Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Chicago and the Chief Scientist at Super.tech.  His work focuses on accelerating the timeline for practical quantum computing by developing software techniques that optimize for the physical properties of quantum hardware.  He leads the EPiQC Project (Enabling Practical-scale Quantum Computing), a $10M flagship national research project funded by the National Science Foundation's Expeditions in Computing program.  Chong received his Ph.D. from MIT in 1996 and is a recipient of the NSF CAREER award, the Intel Outstanding Researcher Award, and 10 best paper awards. 

In Episode 40, Patrick and Ciprian speak with Rob Freeman, language and Artificial Intelligence enthusiast.The team discuss linguistics, machine learning, and defining grammar across all languages from first principals.Rob Freeman is from New Zealand where he studied physics. But a passion to understand thought, in the first place as personally experienced by speaking diverse languages,  led him to spend most of the last 30 years in Asia. There he combined his background in physics with his passion to understand thought by working on machine translation in Japan, and the computational analysis of grammar in Hong Kong. For most of the last 20 years he has been pushing a somewhat different quantum inspired perspective on machine learning, emphasizing aspects of complexity theory, even chaos. Which, quantum included, he sees as potentially being manifestations of properties of distributed representations. And that as a consequence of this, the immediate solution to continuing puzzles of AI may be as simple as turning the "learning" problem upside down. So that, instead of thinking of AI as a process of compressing or "learning" structure, we think of it as being an expansion or generation of structure, which it turns out is more powerful and entangled than we suspected. He believes this offers the key to understanding firstly perception, but also the big questions: creativity, freewill, consciousness. And even suggests a quantum like character and solution for contemporary political fragmentation and social conflict!