Dr Barry Sanders is Director of the Institute for Quantum Science and Technology at the University of Calgary, Lead Investigator of the Alberta Major Innovation Fund Project on Quantum Technologies, a Thousand Talents Chair at the University of Science and Technology China and a Vajra Visiting Faculty member of the Raman Research Institute in India. He received his Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Calgary in 1984 and a Diploma of Imperial College supervised by Professor Sir Thomas W. B. Kibble in 1985. He completed a PhD in 1987 at Imperial College London supervised by Professor Sir Peter Knight. His postdoctoral research was at the Australian National University, the University of Queensland and the University of Waikato. Dr. Sanders was on the Macquarie University faculty from 1991 until moving to Calgary in 2003.

Dr Sanders is especially well known for seminal contributions to theories of quantum-limited measurement, highly nonclassical light, practical quantum cryptography and optical implementations of quantum information tasks. His current research interests include quantum algorithms and implementations of quantum information tasks.

Dr. Sanders is a Fellow of the Institute of Physics (U.K.), the Optical Society of America, the Australian Institute of Physics, the American Physical Society and the Royal Society of Canada, and a Senior Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. He is a past President of the Australian Optical Society, past Founding Co-Chair of the Canadian Association of Physicists Division of Atomic, Molecular and Optical Physics and former Leader of the Optical Society of America Quantum Optical Science and Technology Technical Group. In 2016 Sanders was awarded the Imperial College London Doctor of Science (DSc) degree.

Dr Sanders is Editor-in-Chief of New Journal of Physics, a former Associate Editor of Physical Review A, a former Editor of Optics Communications and a former Editor of Mathematical Structures of Computer Science.

Tutorial Topic: How to Use a Quantum Computer

Website:https://www.iqst.ca/people/peoplepage.php?id=4

Dr. Ämin Baumeler studied computer science at ETH Zurich, Switzerland. His master's project on quantum cryptography was conducted at the Institute for Quantum Computing in Waterloo, Canada, under the supervision of Prof. Anne Broadbent. After having obtained the master's degree from ETH, he started his PhD studies in the research group of Prof. Stefan Wolf at the Faculty of Informatics, Università della Svizzera italiana, Lugano, Switzerland. The research performed in his PhD studies are on causal structures, foundations of quantum theory, and complexity theory. After having obtained the PhD degree in 2016, for which he won the GI-Dissertation prize, he moved to Vienna to join Prof. Časlav Brukner's group at the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information. Most recently he started a shared research group with two colleagues at the same institute.

Tutorial Topic: Causality and Computation

Website: https://www.iqoqi-vienna.at/people/yirg-young-independent-researcher-group/aemin-baumeler/

Dr. Fabio Costa is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Queensland. He holds a DECRA (Discovery Early Career Award) fellowship.

He completed his undergraduate studies at the University of Milan, Italy, in 2007, supervised by Prof. Luigi Galgani. He received his PhD from the University of Vienna in 2013, under the supervision of Prof. Časlav Brukner. He moved to the University of Queensland in 2014, working as a postdoc under the supervision of Prof. Gerard Milburn.

His research focus is causal structures in quantum mechanics and the notion of time at the interplay between quantum mechanics and general relativity. He is known for his work in operational generalisations of quantum theory to scenarios without a background causal structure, as well as research in information-theoretical schemes exploiting quantum control of causal order for computational advantage. He currently works on extending causal models to quantum theory, with application to the theory of open quantum systems and non-Markovianity.

Tutorial Topic: Quantum Processes

Website: https://smp.uq.edu.au/profile/167/fabio-costa

Dr. Denis Rosset works on the characterization of classical and quantum causal structures by applying techniques at the intersection of convex optimization and representation theory. He did his PhD under the supervision of Pr. Nicolas Gisin on extensions of Bell's theorem to scenarios involving multiple independent sources. He is currently developing a suite of software libraries to automate the computation of classical/quantum bounds through noncommutative sums-of-squares decompositions.

Tutorial Topic: Device independence

Website: https://www.perimeterinstitute.ca/people/denis-rosset

Dr. M. Sohaib Alam is a theoretical physicist and software developer at Rigetti Computing. He received his PhD from Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg's group at UT Austin in 2014. His thesis involved studying aspects of the AdS/CFT correspondence in quantum gravity. Before joining the quantum computing industry at Rigetti, he worked at a machine learning startup in the San Francisco Bay Area. He is interested in all things related to quantum computing and machine learning, and is especially interested in near-term applications of noisy quantum devices.

Tutorial Topic: Practical Quantum Programming for Near-Term Hardware

Website: https://www.linkedin.com/in/msohaibalam/

Abstract: Quantum computing promises quantum-enhanced performance for certain problems such as superpolynomial speedup for factorization and quadratic speedup for function inversion. For physics and chemistry, simulating quantum systems could be advantageous on a quantum computer, which natively incorporates quantum operations. Recently quantum computing is employed for a variety of practical applications including solving linear equations, performing machine learning and predicting properties in chemistry. I explain the basics of quantum algorithms and specifically their advantages over non-quantum algorithms followed by how these advantages might be exploited for such applications, also considering limitations to these approaches.

Speaker: Dr. Barry Sanders

Abstract: Computation and physics are inherently intertwined: A physical process can be understood as information processing, and limits on information processing restrain physical theories. In this short course, we will exploit this interplay to study — based on physical motivations — different models of computation, and to challenge potential physical theories against principles from computer science. Our focus is the notion of causality that, traditionally, has a rather rigid definition. Hence, motivated by our current physical theories, we will relax the notion of causality and study the implications for computation. Then again, we will test the developed theories against principles from computer science.

Speaker: Dr. Ämin Baumeler

Abstract: According to quantum mechanics in its ordinary formulation, systems evolve in time through unitary operators acting on Hilbert space. In practical applications, keeping keep track of all degrees of freedom is typically unfeasible, leading to correlations of the system with an inaccessible environment and an effective breakdown of unitarity. The simplest model of noisy evolution is a quantum channel, a transformation from density matrices to density matrices, which form the backbone of large part of quantum information processing theory. However, more general types of processes exist, with large relevance to both technology-oriented applications and foundational investigations.

In this short course, we will review the fundamentals of quantum channels, to quickly move on to their generalisations. We will first study quantum processes with memory, where the environment retains information of previous interactions with the system. As a further generalisation, we will look at scenarios where the causal order between various events in the process is not known or even undefined at a fundamental level. This will bring us to the forefront of current research, which seeks to harness indefinite causal order to obtain advantages in computational and information processing tasks. We will also briefly overview the experimental implementations of protocols with indefinite causal order and the application of the formalism to foundational questions on the interplay between quantum theory and gravity.

Speaker: Dr. Fabio Costa

Abstract: In the device independent paradigm, we test whether observed correlations are compatible with various causal structures. This enables us to check, for example, how classical or quantum resources are distributed between observers. In quantum information, following J.S. Bell idea (https://journals.aps.org/rmp/abstract/10.1103/RevModPhys.86.419, this approach has been fruitful to falsify local realism in experimental realizations of quantum correlations (see, for example, https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.111.130406 or https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.115.250401.

In this presentation, we will focus on a recent technique that can be used to characterize local or quantum correlations, the inflation technique: https://arxiv.org/abs/1609.00672 , which generalizes and incorporates previous approaches such as Bell polytopes.

Title: SoS Optimization
Constrained optimization over commutative and noncommutative polynomials is a widely used tool in quantum information. For example, the characterization of correlations arising out of quantum states and measurements can be cast as a noncommutative polynomial feasibility problem. Sum of squares relaxations provide a way to attack those problems using convex optimization. We will review the mathematical basis of the technique, describe toy problems that can be solved analytically, and discuss software implementations for larger problems and their limits.

Title: Representation theory
Given a finite dimensional representation of a finite or continuous, how can one obtain the list of irreducible subrepresentations present, their multiplicities, and the change of basis that splits the vector space into a direct sum? We will present a new numerical approach to representation theory that allows us to skip most parts of the theory, and still get concrete results.

The talk will be based on a software package in development: https://github.com/replab/replab that requires either Octave (open source) or a recent version of Matlab. We will go through a series of examples that highlight the role of symmetry in quantum information: symmetries of states (singlet/triplet, Werner/isotropic states, GHZ-like symmetries); symmetries of correlations (nonsignaling vs signaling); applying symmetries to sum of squares problems.

Lab session
The lab session will be hands on and will guide the participants through a small problem set combining the three topics presented. We will assume basic proficiency with Octave/Matlab, and ask the participants to install the CVX toolbox before the lab session (http://cvxr.com/cvx/doc/install.html).

Organizer Note: The necessary software will be pre-installed in the IBA computer lab.

Speaker: Dr. Denis Rosset

Quantum computing is a computational paradigm built on the principles of quantum mechanics. It promises to solve several problems that classical computers would never be able to efficiently solve. These problems range from the very practical, such as cyber-security or optimal business logistics, to the very foundational in science, such as how nature behaves at the most fundamental scale. However, many of these promises must await the appearance of fault-tolerant, error-corrected quantum devices, which by many estimates would require thousands of physical qubits. At present, we have at our disposal a few tens of noisy physical qubits to play with, in the form of Noisy Intermediate Scale Quantum (NISQ)[1] devices. Can we do anything useful with such devices?

In this talk, I will first cover the basics of quantum computing, and introduce a few quantum algorithms that illustrate the core concepts involved. I will then discuss a class of variational algorithms relevant for near-term devices, such as the Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm[2] and the Variational Quantum Eigensolver[3, 4]. Such algorithms fit the paradigm of hybrid classical/quantum computation, a paradigm that fits quite neatly with the QUIL[5] programming language. As part of the talk, we will also see how to write code that can run on current-day quantum computers using pyQuil[6], an open source python library.

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1801.00862
[2] https://arxiv.org/abs/1411.4028
[3] https://arxiv.org/abs/1304.3061
[4] https://arxiv.org/abs/1509.04279
[5] https://arxiv.org/abs/1608.03355
[6] https://github.com/rigetti/pyquil