Seminars & Colloquia
Umesh Vazirani
Computer Science, UC Berkeley
"A computational perspective on quantum physics"
Monday April 25, 2011 04:00 PM
Location: 3211, EB2 NCSU Centennial Campus
(Visitor parking instructions)
This talk is part of the Triangle Computer Science Distinguished Lecturer Series
Obviously quantum computation cannot have any impact in the real world until a working quantum computer is built. Or can it? In this talk I will speak about several areas of potential impact. The first is post-quantum cryptography. We may end up switching from RSA to a quantum resistant crypto-system long before a quantum computer is built. The second is a new class of efficient classical algorithms for simulating (certain types of) quantum systems. The last relates to the foundations of quantum physics. Specifically, do the aspects of multi-particle quantum physics that lead to exponential speedups in quantum algorithms, also limit our ability to fully experimentally verify the validity of multi-particle quantum physics?
The talk is aimed at a general audience, and will not assume a background in quantum physics.
Umesh Vazirani received his B.Tech. in computer science from MIT in 1981 and his Ph.D. in computer science from U.C. Berkeley in 1986. He is the Roger Strauch Professor of EECS at U.C. Berkeley and director of BQIC - the Berkeley center for Quantum Information and Computation.
Prof. Vazirani is a theoretician with broad interests in novel models of computation. He has done seminal work in quantum computation and on the computational foundations of randomness. He is the author of "An introduction to computational learning theory", (MIT Press 1994, with Michael Kearns) and the undergraduate textbook "Algorithms", (McGraw-Hill 2006, with Sanjoy Dasgupta and Christos Papadimitriou).
Host: Kamesh Munagala, Computer Science, Duke
To access the video of this talk, click here.