DISTINGUISHED SPEAKER SEMINARS

Theoretical Reflections on Quantum Supremacy

Speaker
Professor Umesh Vazirani, UC Berkeley
Chaired by
Dr Rahul JAIN, Professor, School of Computing
rahul@comp.nus.edu.sg

28 Sep 2020 Monday, 11:00 AM to 12:00 PM

via Zoom

Abstract:
The recent demonstration of quantum supremacy by Google is a first step towards the era of small to medium scale quantum computers. In this talk I will explain what the experiment accomplished and the theoretical work it is based on, as well as what it did not accomplish and the many theoretical and practical challenges that remain. I will also describe recent breakthroughs in the design of protocols for the testing and benchmarking of quantum computers, a task that has deep computational and philosophical implications. Specifically, this leads to protocols for scalable and verifiable quantum supremacy, certifiable quantum random generation and verification of quantum computation.


Biodata:
Umesh Vazirani is the Roger A. Strauch Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) at the University of California, Berkeley, and the co-director of the Berkeley Quantum Computation Center (BQIC). He is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He was awarded the Fulkerson Prize for 2012. His research interests lie primarily in quantum computing. He is also a co-author of a textbook on algorithms and, on computational machine learning.