Invited Speakers

  Guest Speakers

Steven H Adachi

Steve Adachi is currently the principal investigator for the Lockheed Martin Space research program in quantum computing applications.  Previously he was a system architect for 8 years on several large military satellite programs.  Prior to Lockheed Martin, he spent 10 years at AT&T Bell Labs and Lucent Technologies as a systems engineer, software architect, & project manager, & was a Director of Software Engineering at Covad Communications.  He has a B.S. in Mathematics from Harvey Mudd College, and a Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from Brown University.

 

Shunta Arai

Shunta Arai is a master's student in Graduate School of Information Sciences, Tohoku University. He is majoring in statistical machine learning and quantum annealing. His main interests are in applications of various techniques in statistical machine learning to intractable problems in physics. His recent study is for example on detection of phase transition by neural network. He is also a member of Tohoku university Quantum Annealing Research and Development (T-QARD). His new interest is to utilize D-Wave2000Q to perform Monte Carlo Simulation efficiently.

 

Juan Atalay

Juan Atalaya is an Assistant Project Scientist currently working at University of California, Riverside. Juan has been doing research on the subject of continuous quantum measurement of noncommuting observables on superconducting qubits (SCQs). Juan has also investigated the continuous operation of quantum error correcting subsystem codes. Other areas of Juan’s expertise include Nanomechanics, where he studied dephasing and dissipation mechanisms in nanomechanical resonators, 1/f-flux noise in SCQs, and shielding methods to mitigate low-frequency magnetic fields. Juan obtained his PhD in Physics at Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, and his BSc in Electrical Engineering at National University of Engineering, Peru.

 

Lucas Brady

Lucas Brady recently finished his PhD studies with Prof. Wim van Dam at the University of California Santa Barbara.  There he studied the effects of barrier tunneling on quantum adiabatic optimization and quantum Monte Carlo.  He has accepted an NRC Postdoctoral Fellowship for the Fall at NIST Gaithersburg working with Yi-Kai Liu and Alexey Gorshkov.  During this postdoc he will closely interact with the Joint Center for Quantum Information and Computer Science (QuICS) at the University of Maryland.

 

Keith Britt

Keith Britt is a Ph.D. student at the University of Tennessee performing his quantum computing research at Oak Ridge National Laboratory under the supervision of Dr. Travis Humble. He is currently working to complete his thesis focusing on the creation of a quantum computing productivity benchmark and plans on graduating in late 2018. Thus, Keith Britt needs a job.

 

Nikesh S Dattani

Nike Dattani completed his undergraduate degrees in Mathematics, Physics and Biology at University of Waterloo, and a thesis with Ray Laflamme, Director at Institute for Quantum Computing. He then did his PhD in Chemistry at Oxford University, where he then became a Lecturer. He has also run a small Lab at Kyoto University in Japan, and held visiting positions in Singapore for 6 months, at the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Systems for 3 months, and a Banting Fellowship in Canada. He began working at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in September 2018.

 

Chunqing Deng

Chunqing Deng is a lead scientist at D-Wave Systems Inc. He received his BSc from Peking University. He then move to University of Waterloo, Canada, where he obtained his PhD in 2015, under the supervision of Professor A. Lupascu. His PhD work involved the development of new control scheme and the investigation of decoherence mechanism in superconducting qubits.  He is currently working on improving the coherence of superconducting qubits and developing novel qubit-qubit interactions for future-generation adiabatic quantum processors.

 

Keisuke Fujii

Keisuke Fujii received his PhD from Kyoto University, doing his Postdoc at Osaka University. He has since held positions at The Hakubi center for advanced research, Kyoto University (Assistant Professor), Photon Science Center of The University of Tokyo, (Assistant Professor), Department of Physics, Graduate School of Science, Kyoto University, (Associate Professor) and Osaka University (Visiting Associate Professor). Hi research interests focus on quantum computing, quantum error correction, and quantum computational complexity.

 

Itay Hen

Itay Hen is a computer scientist with the Information Sciences Institute of USC and a research assistant professor in USC’s department of physics and astronomy. Hen’s research is mainly in the fields of analog quantum computing and computational physics.

 

Tadashi Kadowaki

Tadashi Kadowaki received the PhD in Physics from Tokyo Institute of Technology in 1999. During his PhD period, he formulated quantum annealing of the transverse Ising model with Prof. Nishimori in 1998. After the PhD, he worked on development of field programable gate array in a semiconductor company. In 2001, he changed his carrier to data science and artificial intelligence in life science. He contributed to FDA approvals of a cancer drug as a data scientist as well as he led deep learning applications in a pharmaceutical company. Recently he joined DENSO to restart study of quantum annealing.

 

Andrew King

Andrew King earned his Ph.D. at McGill University in the School of Computer Science in 2009, where his research focused on structural graph theory and combinatorial algorithms.  He worked as a researcher at Prague's Institute for Theoretical Informatics and Columbia University, where he was part of an international team that proved the long-standing Lovasz-Plummer Conjecture on perfect matchings in cubic graphs.  He returned to his native Vancouver in 2011 for postdoctoral work at Simon Fraser University before joining D-Wave in 2013.  As Performance Research Team Lead, his research explores mechanisms for performance enhancement and measurement in optimization, sampling, and simulation applications.

 

Vaibhaw Kumar

Vaibhaw Kumar is a Staff Scientist in the Quantum Computing group at Booz Allen Hamilton. His research focuses on the development of novel machine learning algorithms tailored to run on the current generation of quantum computing hardware. In the past, he has developed advanced Monte Carlo simulation techniques and novel sampling methods to study chemical systems at the molecular level. Vaibhaw Kumar joined Booz Allen after receiving his PhD in Chemical Engineering from SUNY Buffalo, and subsequently worked as a post-doctoral fellow in the Department of Chemical Engineering at MIT.

 

Wolfgang Lechner

Wolfgang Lechner studied Physics at the University of Vienna where he received his PhD in 2009 in computational physics under supervision of Christoph Dellago. After working as a PostDoc in the group of Peter Bolhuis in Amsterdam he moved to the University of Innsbruck. There Wolfgang Lechner worked with Peter Zoller on quantum computing and developed a lattice gauge formulation of optimization problems for quantum annealing. Since 2017 he is Assistant Professor (tenure track) at the University of Innsbruck with an independent group working on quantum optimization.

 

Adrian Lupascu

Adrian Lupascu obtained his PhD at Delft University of Technology in 2005, where his work involved dispersive measurements of superconducting qubits. After his PhD, he took a short postdoctoral position in Delft, to work on measurement and decoherence of superconducting qubits. In 2006, he started a postdoc at ENS Paris. Supported by a Marie Curie Fellowship, he did research on cold atoms and superconducting detectors. He joined the Institute for Quantum Computing in 2009, where he is investigating superconducting systems and their applications in quantum information processing, quantum sensing, and quantum optics. He is the recipient of a Sloan Research Fellowship.

 

Milad Marvian

Milad Marvian is a postdoctoral researcher at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His main research interests are quantum information and quantum computing. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Southern California in 2017, with a focus on quantum error correction, adiabatic quantum computing, and open quantum systems.

 

Peter McMahon

Peter received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering in 2014 from Stanford University in the group of Yoshihisa Yamamoto. His graduate work was on the development of building blocks for quantum computers and quantum repeaters using semiconductor systems. He subsequently began a postdoctoral appointment jointly in the groups of Hideo Mabuchi and Yoshihisa Yamamoto, working on the development of hybrid optical-electronic computing machines using principles and techniques borrowed from quantum optics.

 

Denis Melanson

Denis Melanson is currently a second year Master’s student at the University of Waterloo in the Department of Physics & Astronomy at the Institute for Quantum Computing. Melanson’s graduate student work has been focussed on quantum annealing with superconducting qubits. On the quest to improve the performance of future quantum annealers, Melanson has been investigating and designing novel quantum annealing components compatible with high coherence flux qubits, such as flux qubit readout devices and multi-qubit couplers.

 

Ryoji Miyazaki

Ryoji Miyazaki is a physicist working at Tohoku University on a theory and applications of the coherent Ising machine, a physical solver for optimization problems with lights. He started studying statistical mechanics of spin systems, e.g., spin glasses, as a Ph.D. student under Prof. Hidetoshi Nishimori. After receiving his Ph.D. degree, he joined a group studying structural glasses as a postdoc. While investigating slow dynamics of glasses, his interest moved to dynamics in complicated systems. His current, main project is to reveal the dynamics of lights in the machines in solving optimization problems in the statistical-mechanical view.

 

Toshiyuki Miyazawa

Toshiyuki Miyazawa is a Senior Researcher at Fujitsu Laboratories Ltd. His work now focuses on developing Fujitsu's Digital Annealer which is used to solve fully-connected quadratic Boolean combinatorial problems. Before developing the Digital Annealer, he researched on nano-scaled semiconductor devices for quantum key distribution and quantum information processing. In 2013, he received the Young Scientists’ Prize from the Commendation for Science and Technology by the Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology of Japan, for his research on the single-photon emitting devices using telecommunication-bands quantum dots. He obtained his PhD in engineering from the university of Tokyo in 2011.

 

Evgeny Mozgunov

Evgeny Mozgunov received his Ph.D. in Physics from Caltech.  During his Ph.D., he studied his advisor Alexei Kitaev’s work on classification of interacting topological phases.   That inspired a mathematical result defining the concept of a local gap of a hamiltonian.   His thesis involved the study of many-body localization and translated the results of condensed matter physics into the language of quantum information.  As a Research Associate at USC, his research activities focus on the simulation of open system quantum dynamics.  He has also supervised five summer students on projects ranging from machine learning to thermalization and error-correcting codes.

 

Sergey Novikov

Sergey Novikov is an experimental physicist working on superconducting computing technologies at Northrop Grumman. Sergey received his B.A. in physics and computer science from the University of Chicago, with his research focusing on hydrodynamic interactions in low-dimensional colloidal systems. During his Ph.D. study at University of Maryland, Sergey worked on attaining quantum optics phenomena with superconducting qubits through engineered dissipation. After joining Northrop Grumman, Sergey worked on superconducting quantum computing, before becoming the circuit design lead for the Quantum Enhanced Optimization program. Sergey’s research interests include superconducting quantum annealing, superconducting digital logic, and quantum processor architecture.

 

Mark A. Novotny

Mark A. Novotny is Professor and Head of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Mississippi State University, and is a Giles Distinguished Professor.  He obtained his BS from North Dakota State University and his PhD from Stanford University.  He has published more than 200 articles in refereed journals, with emphasis on computational physics approaches to materials and to quantum systems.  He is co-inventor of one patent on perfectly scalable architectures, and has patents pending related to quantum dragon nanodevices and small world interconnects for quantum computers.  He is a Fellow of both APS and AAAS.

 

Jaspreet Oberoi

Jas Oberoi received the Bachelor of engineering degree from Thapar University, India in the field of electronics and communication. During his MS and PhD adventures at Simon Fraser University, Canada he worked on optimization algorithms, mathematical modeling, machine learning and big data. Jas has been with 1QBit, Vancouver for almost 5 years now and is currently leading the 1QBit machine learning team.

 

Masayuki Ozeki

Masayuki Ozeki is an associate professor at Tohoku University. He attained Ph. D of Science under supervision of Prof. Hidetoshi Nishimori at Tokyo Institute of Technology. His carrier started from Post doctoral researcher at Tokyo Tech. (2008-2010) and then became Assistant Professor at Kyoto University (2010-2016) and Researcher at Rome University “La Sapienza” (2011-2012). His main interests are machine learning from a perspective of theoretical physics. He was awarded with the Young Scientists’ Prize of from the Commendation for Science and Technology by the Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology.

 

Barış Özgüler

Barış Özgüler is a PhD candidate in physics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His interests include adiabatic quantum computing, topological matter and many-body localization.

 

Sebastiano Pilati

Sebastiano Pilati is currently an assistant professor at the University of Camerino (Italy). His research activity focuses on quantum many-body systems, quantum Monte Carlo algorithms, and simulated quantum annealing. Previously he worked at the University of Padova, at the ICTP (Trieste, Italy) as a Ludwig Boltzmann Fellow, and at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (Zurich, Switzerland). He co-organized the workshop on “Theory and Practice of Adiabatic Quantum Computers and Quantum Simulation” that took place at ICTP (Trieste, Italy) in August 2016. He has a PhD in Physics from the University of Trento.

 

David Roberts

David Roberts is a physics PhD candidate in the [Aash] Clerk group at the University of Chicago, with his research focused on developing mathematical tools to non-perturbatively solve and model dissipation in networks of superconducting qubits. Prior to joining the theoretical physics PhD program at the University of Chicago, David graduated with honors in physics and mathematics at Harvard University, and was subsequently sponsored by the Research Institute for Advanced Computer Science (RIACS) at USRA as an intern at NASA QuAIL, where he developed new mathematical techniques for studying noise at spin glass bottlenecks of quantum annealing under the supervision of Andre Petukhov and Sergey Knysh.

 

Pooya Ronagh

Pooya Ronagh is the Applied Mathematics Research Lead at 1QBit. He is jointly a Postdoctoral Fellow of the Institute for Quantum Computing and the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Waterloo. He is an Associate Researcher at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. His research is focused on the synergy between mathematical programming, machine learning, and quantum computation. He holds BS degrees in Computer Science and Mathematics and MS and PhD degrees in Mathematics after studying at Sharif University of Technology, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of British Columbia.

 

Vadim Smelyanskiy

Vadim Smelyanskiy is Senior Staff Research Scientist at Google Quantum AI team. He received his PhD in Theoretical Physics 1992 from  Institute of Semiconductors, Kiev Ukraine. He had postdoctoral fellowships in Michigan State University and Princeton. He worked at NASA Ames since 2000. He lead the Applied Physics  and Quantum computing group working as a Principle Scientist in Information Technology directorate joining Google in 2015. Vadim works on quantum optimization algorithms for near term and future quantum devices and noise analysis in quantum devices.

 

Yigit Subasi

Yigit Subasi got his PhD in physics from the University of Maryland, College Park. His thesis work was on the nonequilibrium dynamics of open quantum systems. He then became a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of Maryland where he worked on adiabatic quantum computing and stochastic thermodynamics. He is currently a postdoctoral researcher in the Los Alamos National Laboratory working on quantum information theory including quantum algorithms.

 

Yuki Susa

Yuki Susa is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Nishimori group at Tokyo Institute of Technology (Tokyo Tech). In 2016 he received his Doctor of Science from Tokyo Tech. Currently he is working on a theory to improve the efficiency of quantum annealing.

 

Kotaro Tanahashi

Kotaro Tanahashi received his masters of engineering in polymer physics at the graduate school of Kyoto University and is currently a Machine Learning engineer at Recruit Communications Co., Ltd. in Tokyo.

 

Davide Venturelli

Davide Venturelli graduated from Ecole Normale Superieure (ENSLyon) and obtained his Ph.D. at the International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA) and at the Universite de Grenoble (CNRS). He worked as a postdoc as Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa on physics of quantum dots and electron spin-qubits, and in 2012 he joins USRA, to work at the NASA Quantum Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (QuAIL) on theory, programming, design of quantum processors and algorithms. His work on applications in quantum annealing is on the topics of automated scheduling, telecommunication networks, robotics, AI planning, in collaborations with governmental institutions, universities and the private sector.

 

Guillaume Verdon

Guillaume Verdon is a PhD student in Applied Mathematics and Quantum Information at the Institute for Quantum Computing (IQC), University of Waterloo, and the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. His doctoral research is focused on the theory and implementation of Quantum Algorithms for Quantum Deep Learning and Quantum-Enhanced Optimization. Previously, he obtained his Master of Mathematics degree from IQC and UWaterloo, with a thesis focused on Quantum Algorithms and Quantum Field Theory. He also holds an Honours Bachelor of Science degree in Mathematics & Physics from McGill University.

 

Walter Vinci

Walter Vinci received his Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Pisa. During his Ph.D. and first postdoc at the University of Minnesota, he studied supersymmetric models for particle confinement involving topological solitons. His research also involved the study of solitonic structures in condensed matter systems. As a Research Associate at the University of Southern California, his research activities focused on adiabatic quantum computation, quantum and classical optimization, and open system quantum dynamics. He is now a Theoretical Physicist at D-Wave Sys. working on the development of quantum machine learning algorithms suitable for quantum annealers.