Scott Aaronson
Scott Aaronson, David J. Bruton Centennial Professor of Computer Science, University of Texas at Austin, will present “Quantum Supremacy and Its Applications” at a Joint Director’s Special Colloquium & Physics Colloquium.
The event takes place Friday, March 1, 2019, at 10:30 a.m. in the Building 402 Auditorium. All employees whose schedules permit are invited to attend.
Abstract
In the near future, there will likely be special-purpose quantum computers with 50-70 high-quality qubits and controllable nearest neighbor couplings. In this talk, I’ll discuss general theoretical foundations for how to use such devices to demonstrate “quantum supremacy:” that is, a clear quantum speedup for *some* task, motivated by the goal of overturning the Extended Church-Turing Thesis (which says that all physical systems can be efficiently simulated by classical computers) as confidently as possible. I’ll then discuss some new work on how these sorts of experiments could be used to generate certified random bits, for use in cryptographic protocols and other applications.
Biography
Scott Aaronson is David J. Bruton Centennial Professor of Computer Science at the University of Texas at Austin. He received his bachelor’s from Cornell University and his Ph.D. from UC Berkeley, and did postdoctoral fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Study as well as the University of Waterloo. Before coming to UT Austin, he spent nine years as a professor in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT. Aaronson’s research in theoretical computer science has focused mainly on the capabilities and limits of quantum computers. His first book, “Quantum Computing Since Democritus,” was published in 2013 by Cambridge University Press. He’s received the National Science Foundation’s Alan T. Waterman Award, the United States PECASE Award, the Vannevar Bush Fellowship, the Tomassoni-Chisesi Prize in Physics and MIT’s Junior Bose Award for Excellence in Teaching.