Daniel Lidar: "Quantum Information Processing: Are We There Yet?"

Daniel Lidar visited the Quantum AI Lab at Google LA to give a talk: "Quantum Information Processing: Are We There Yet?" This talk took place on January 22, 2015. Abstract: Quantum information processing holds great promise, yet large-scale, general purpose quantum computers capable of solving hard problems are not yet available despite 20+ years of immense effort. In this talk I will describe some of this promise and effort, as well as the obstacles and ideas for overcoming them using error correction techniques. I will focus on a special purpose quantum information processor called a quantum annealer, designed to speed up the solution to tough optimization problems. In October 2011 USC and Lockheed-Martin jointly founded a quantum computing center housing a commercial quantum annealer built by the Canadian company D-Wave Systems. A similar device is operated by NASA and Google. These processors use superconducting flux qubits to minimize the energy of classical spin-glass models with as many spins as qubits, an NP-hard problem with numerous applications. There has been much controversy surrounding the D-Wave processors, questioning whether they offer any advantage over classical computing. I will survey the recent work we have done to benchmark the processors against highly optimized classical algorithms, to test for quantum effects, and to perform error correction. Bio: Daniel Lidar has worked in quantum computing for nearly 20 years. He is a professor of electrical engineering, chemistry, and physics at USC, and hold a Ph.D. in physics from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His work revolves around various aspects of quantum information science, including quantum algorithms, quantum control, the theory of open quantum systems, and theoretical as well as experimental adiabatic quantum computation. He is a Fellow of the AAAS, APS, and IEEE. Lidar is the Director of the USC Center for Quantum Information Science and Technology, and is the Scientific Director of the USC-Lockheed Martin Center for Quantum Computing. Two of his former graduate students are now research scientists at Google’s quantum artificial intelligence lab.