Saikat Guha

Director, NSF Center for Quantum Networks and Associate Professor of Optical Sciences, Electrical & Computer Engineering, and Applied Mathematics, University of Arizona

In this talk, I will give an overview of the recently awarded $51M ten-year Engineering Research Center, called the "Center for Quantum Networks" (CQN). The goal of this highly-transdisciplinary center is to lay the foundations of the quantum internet, and develop associated devices, technologies, software and networking stack to enable fault-tolerant quantum networking. The center also has a thrust that studies the societal impacts of the quantum internet and associated technologies, hand-in-hand with the engineering research. Finally, the center has a strong focus on education and workforce development in Quantum Information Science and Engineering (QISE).

Saikat is an Associate Professor at the University of Arizona, James C. Wyant College of Optical Sciences, starting July 2017, and the director of the NSF Center for Quantum Networks (CQN). From 2008 to 2017, he worked for Raytheon BBN Technologies, where in his most recent role as Lead Scientist, he led various sponsored projects funded by DARPA, ONR, NSF, DoE, and ARL, in topics surrounding quantum enhanced photonic information processing. He was one of the founding members of the Quantum Information Processing group at BBN, formed in 2009. Saikat earned his B.Tech. in Electrical Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology in 2002, and his S.M. (2004) and Ph.D (2008) in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Saikat's research interests are in the quantum limits of optical communications, quantum-secured communications and optical sensing and imaging--both in the evaluations of fundamental limits using tools from quantum information and estimation theory, as well as in the associated circuit synthesis problem, that of trying to piece together familiar classical and non-classical optical building blocks to realize transmitters and receivers needed to attain those limits. He is interested in quantum repeater and network architectures, and in continuous variable photonic quantum computing.

Saikat received the Raytheon 2011 Excellence in Engineering and Technology Award, Raytheon's highest technical honor, for work his team did on the DARPA-funded Information in a Photon program. He was a co-recipient of an honorable mention in NSA's 2016 Cybersecurity Best Paper Award for a paper on Quantum-Secure Covert Communication on Bosonic Channels, which he supervised. He was a recipient of Anita Jones Entrepreneurial Award 2013 from BBN Technologies, a co-recipient of a NASA Tech Brief Award for his work on Phase-conjugate receiver for Gaussian-state quantum illumination, and received the Raymie Stata Award for outstanding performance as Teaching Assistant for Signals and Systems, Fall 2005, from the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, MIT. He received the Sridhar Memorial Prize for the best student in the graduating class of Electrical Engineering in 2002, at IIT Kanpur. Saikat was a member of India's first team to the International Physics Olympiad at Reykjavik in 1998, where he received an Honorable Mention and the European Physical Society (EPS) Award for the experimental component. He is a Senior Member of the IEEE.