This will be a virtual seminar

Abstract

Recent advances in experimental quantum computing are propelling us towards the era of small to medium scale quantum computers. But quantum computation also forces us to reimagine our entire conception of computation, with major implications for both computer science and physics. In this talk I will discuss these conceptual changes while describing recent breakthroughs in the design of protocols for the testing and benchmarking of quantum computers, a task that has deep computational and philosophical implications. I will describe how this leads to protocols for scalable and verifiable quantum supremacy, certifiable quantum random generation and verification of quantum computation.

Biography

Umesh Vazirani is Strauch Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at UC Berkeley, and Director of the Berkeley Quantum Computing Center (BQIC). His 1993 paper with Ethan Bernstein laid the foundations of quantum complexity theory, and his research has touched on many facets of quantum computation, including Quantum Algorithms, Quantum Hamiltonian Complexity and Interactive classical testing of quantum devices. Vazirani is co-winner of the Fulkerson Prize for the ARV graph partitioning algorithm, a member of the NAS, and co-author of two books: An Introduction to Computational Learning Theory (MIT Press) and Algorithms (McGraw-Hill).