Events

Quantum Nano Centre (QNC) Room 0101, 200 University Avenue West, Waterloo, ON

IQC Colloquium, Harry Buhrman - QuSoft

One of the major challenges in computer science is to establish lower bounds on the resources, usually time, that are needed to solve computational problems. This holds in particular for computational problems that appear in practise. One way towards dealing with this situation is the study of fine- grained complexity where we use special reductions to prove time lower bounds for many diverse problems based on the conjectured hardness of some key problems.

Quantum Nano Centre (QNC) Room 1201, 200 University Avenue West, Waterloo, ON

IQC Seminar Featuring Jasminder Sidhu, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow

A network of quantum technologies will herald improvements to applications ranging from communications, sensing, and computing. Finite resources available in practical implementations and losses are two prominent limitations to the global scale-up of distributed quantum technologies. This can lead to a significant departure in the expected performance of these applications and limits their range. In this talk, I will highlight recent work that looks into the impact of finite resources to determine practical performances in satellite-based quantum communications. I will also introduce recent proposals that leverage space-based quantum repeaters to extend the range of quantum networks.

Kim de Laat, University of Waterloo

Quantum Nano Centre (QNC) Room 0101, 200 University Avenue West, Waterloo, ON

The field of quantum computing has a unique opportunity to pre-empt many of the inequities that have riddled AI and computer science. But radical technologies require new, radical solutions. In this talk, I take issue with the leaky pipeline metaphor as a way of structuring policy interventions concerning inequality in STEM fields. I outline three reasons why overreliance on the leaky pipeline metaphor is problematic: (1) it does not accurately represent the phenomenon it is meant to describe; (2) it is incomplete; and (3) it does not capture the full heterogeneity of experiences with inequality in STEM disciplines. I conclude the talk by sharing feedback from the quantum technology community concerning potential pitfalls in the pursuit of equity in quantum, and what we can do about it.