CIS Seminar: “Theoretical Reflections on Quantum Supremacy”

Umesh Vazirani is the Strauch Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at U.C. Berkeley, Director of the Berkeley Quantum Information and Computation Center, and one of the founders of the field of quantum computation. His particular research interest lies in exploring fundamental science through the computational lens — including computational theories of randomness, computational theories of evolution and computational tests of quantum devices and quantum mechanics. His bid scaling algorithm for the AdWords auction is widely used by Internet search companies, and in 2012 Arora, Rao and Vazirani won the Fulkerson Prize in Discrete Mathematics for their algorithm for graph partitioning based on geometric embeddings. He is a member of the National Academy of Science, and the author of two books An Introduction to Computational Learning Theory with Michael Kearns (MIT Press) and Algorithms with Sanjoy Dasgupta and Christos Papadimitriou (McGraw Hill).