[Colloquium] CS/IME Distinguished Lecture 5/10 at 2:30pm - Umesh Vazirani (University of California, Berkeley)

[Sandra Quarles via Colloquium]

REMINDER:

UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE
DISTINGUISHED LECTURE SERIES
(This is a joint Computer Science and IME distinguished lecture.)

https://cs.uchicago.edu/page/distinguished-lecture-series <https://cs.uchicago.edu/page/distinguished-lecture-series>

Umesh Vazirani (University of California, Berkeley)

Wednesday, May 10, 2017 at 2:30pm
Ryerson 251

Title:   Testing Quantum Devices and Quantum Mechanics    

Abstract:

The tremendous recent progress in the physical realization of devices based on the principles of quantum mechanics also throws up a fundamental challenge: how to test quantum devices, which are by nature imperfect and susceptible to uncontrollable faults. The classical verifier of such a device is necessarily at a disadvantage due to the exponential power of quantum systems, but an exciting sequence of results show that uniquely quantum features such as entanglement (Einstein's "spooky action at a distance") together with the key computer science concept of interactive proofs, can be leveraged to make such testing possible. I will describe how such testing can thwart a malicious adversary in quantum cryptographic settings such as quantum key distribution and certifying quantum random numbers More sophisticated such schemes can be used to verify that a quantum computer is truly quantum. At a conceptual level, such tests of quantum devices are really tests of quantum mechanics that go well beyond the famous Bell tests, that disproved Einstein's objections to quantum mechanics.  I will also describe a more pragmatic but principled approach to the testing of large scale quantum annealers - by performing a quantum Turing test comparing the quantum annealer to a suitable classical benchmark. I will discuss the results of applying such a test to the D-Wave 108 qubit quantum annealer, as well as the ~1000 qubit D-Wave 2X quantum annealer. 


The talk is accesible to a general CS audience.   

Bio:
Umesh Vazirani is the Strauch Distinguished Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at University of California, Berkeley, and is the director of the Berkeley Quantum Information and Computation Center. Professor Vazirani has done foundational work on the computational foundations of randomness, algorithms and novel models of computation. His 1993 paper with Ethan Bernstein helped launch the field of quantum complexity theory. In 2007-08, he was appointed Keenan Visiting Professor for distinguished teaching at Princeton University. He is the author of two books An Introduction to Computational Learning Theory with Michael Kearns (MIT Press) and Algorithms with Sanjoy Dasgupta and Christos Papadimitriou (McGraw Hill).


Host:  Fred Chong


*Reception to follow in Ry 255 at 3:30pm*




Sandy Quarles
Project Assistant
Computer Science Department
1100 E. 58th Street
Chicago, IL 60637
773.702.3508
773.702.8487 Fax








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