Speaker Bios
Full schedule can be viewed here.
Hartmut Neven is an Engineering Director at Google. He is the founder and manager of the Quantum Artificial Intelligence lab. The objective of the lab is to fabricate quantum processors and develop novel quantum algorithms to dramatically accelerate computational tasks for machine intelligence. Previously, Hartmut was head of the Visual Search team. His team developed the visual search service which today is used by a large number of Google products including Image Search, Google Photos, YouTube, Street View and Google Goggles. His teams won a number of competitions designed to establish the best visual recognition software for faces (FERET 1996, FRVT 2002), objects (ImageNet 2014) and text (ICDAR 2013). Hartmut was also a co-founder of project Glass and led the team that built the first prototype. Prior to joining Google, Hartmut started two computer vision companies, the second one was acquired by Google in 2006. Hartmut obtained his Ph.D. in 1996 with a thesis on "Dynamics for vision-guided autonomous mobile robots". Then he became a research professor for computer science and theoretical neuroscience at the University of Southern California.
Emi Mahmoud, Poet
World Champion Poet and Goodwill Ambassador for UNHCR
Emtithal (Emi) Mahmoud is a two time World Champion Poet, Goodwill Ambassador for UNHCR— the UN Refugee Agency, and was named one of BBC's 100 Most Inspirational Women. Emi co-founded a Sickle Cell research initiative at age 19. She has since worked with President Obama, the Dalai Lama, Forbes 30 Under 30. Emi has given multiple presentations at the United Nations General Assembly, The World Economic Forum, Google Zeitgeist, and various high-level events. In 2017, Emi created and hosted the first fully inclusive civilian peace talks and roundtables across her native Sudan; She then, in 2018, as founder of the One Girl Walk and Dreams for Peace Initiatives, walked 1000km for peace in 30 days, mobilizing thousands of people along the way. In the final stages of the 2020 Darfur peace agreement, Emi acted as an independent advisor on civilian inclusion and citizenship representation, putting forth unprecedented recommendations for civil liberties, gender equality, education, refugee rights, inclusion, diversity, and the rights of all vulnerable populations across the country. Emi, author of Sisters’ Entrance, was featured among Harper's Bazaar’s New Changemakers of 2020 alongside several other groundbreaking artists, leaders, and entrepreneurs. Emi graduated from Yale in 2016 where studied Anthropology and Molecular Cellular & Developmental Biology earning a Bachelors of Science and Certificate in Global Health. Emi's background places her at the intersection of the humanities and sciences offering a poignant perspective on some of the most salient issues of our time.
Anthony Megrant, Google Hardware Lead, Devices
Anthony Megrant leads our Quantum Device Team, which is responsible for the design, fabrication and characterization of Google’s quantum processors and their integration with the control system. He earned his BS in applied physics from Cornell University in 2009 and his PhD in materials science from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2016. Since joining Google in 2015, Anthony and his team have worked to improve the performance and increase the scale of our quantum processors. Anthony co-led the design of Google’s 54-qubit “Sycamore” processor and led its fabrication, buildout, and testing.
Yu Chen, Google Hardware Lead, Metrology
Yu Chen leads our Hardware Metrology Team, which is responsible for developing metrology tools to improve our quantum computing system performance. He earned his PhD in physics from the University of Minnesota and did postdoctoral research at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Since joining Google in 2014, Yu and his team have worked to build fundamental understandings to our technology stack. These span from optimizing component performance such as gate or readout to developing next-generation hardware, such as cryogenic systems, necessary to scale Google’s quantum computing systems.
Julian Kelly, GoogleHardware Lead, System Control
Julian Kelly leads our System Control Team, which is responsible for building the hardware and software required to operate quantum computers. Julian earned his PhD in Physics at University of California, Santa Barbara. His thesis focused on the development of "Xmon" transmon systems that demonstrated record-setting fidelity entangling gate and measurement operations, culminating in a demonstration of experimental quantum error correction. Since joining Google in 2015 Google, Julian and his team have worked to improve, scale, and integrate quantum processors. Julian led the design of Google’s 72-qubit “Bristlecone” processor. He also developed the automated calibration framework "Optimus", the software backbone for operating quantum processors at Google.
Matt McEwen, GoogleStudent Researcher
Matt McEwen is a Student Researcher in the Quantum Hardware Team and a PhD student at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Originally from Australia, where he worked on single-atom spin qubits, Matt now focuses on practical quantum error correction, studying sources of strong correlated error in large qubit arrays.
Jimmy Chen, GoogleQuantum Electronics Engineer
Jimmy Chen is Senior Research Scientist with Google Quantum AI. He received his BS in Physics from the University of Minnesota and his PhD from UC Santa Barbara. His research focuses on calibration of scalable superconducting quantum processors, as well as the experimental implementation of error correcting codes.
Jens Palsberg, UCLAProfessor
Jens Palsberg is a Professor and former Department Chair of Computer Science at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). His research interests span the areas of programming languages, software engineering, and quantum computing. He is a member of the ACM Executive Committee and a member of the editorial board of Information and Computation. In 2012 he received the ACM SIGPLAN Distinguished Service Award.
Dorit Aharonov is a Professor at the school of computer science and engineering at the Hebrew university of Jerusalem, and the CSO of QEDMA quantum computing. Aharonov is a world renowned leader in the area of quantum computing; In her PhD she proved the celebrated quantum fault tolerance theorem together with her advisor Ben-Or; and later continued to make other pioneering works in a variety of areas within quantum complexity and algorithms, including quantum walks, quantum adiabatic computation, Hamiltonian complexity, quantum cryptography and quantum verification. Much of her research can be viewed as creating a bridge between physics and computer science, attempting to study fundamental physics questions using computation language. Aharonov was educated at the Hebrew university (BSc in Math and Physics, PhD in Computer Science and Physics) and then continued to a postdoc at IAS Princeton (Mathematics) and UC Berkeley (Computer Science). She had joined the faculty of the computer science department of the Hebrew university of Jerusalem in 2001. In 2005 Aharonov was featured by the journal Nature as one of four theoreticians making waves in their chosen field; in 2006 she had won the Krill prize, and in 2014 she was awarded the prestigious Michael Bruno award. In 2020 she had joined forces with Dr. Asif Sinay and Prof Netanel Lindner to co-found the company QEDMA where she is now the CSO, In parallel, she continues to lead her quantum computation research group at the Hebrew university.
Joonho Lee, Columbia UniversityPh.D.
Dr. Joonho Lee earned his B.S. in chemistry and physics in 2013 from Pohang University of Science and Technology, South Korea. He then moved to the United States to study as a Kwanjeong Educational Foundation fellow at Caltech where he earned his M.S. in chemistry under Prof. Thomas F. Miller III. Subsequently, he moved to UC Berkeley in 2015 and completed his Ph.D. work in chemistry in 2019 under Prof. Martin P. Head-Gordon. During his Ph.D., Joonho explored various aspects of quantum chemistry including regularized perturbation theory, coupled-cluster methods for strongly correlated systems, and cost-effective wavefunctions for quantum computations. Joonho is also an active developer of a commercial software Q-Chem and received the 2019 Michael Wormit award for his contributions. Towards the end of his Ph.D., Joonho was privileged to work with Dr. Miguel A. Morales and Dr. Fionn D. Malone as an intern at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory where he worked on using quantum Monte Carlo for model solids. In September 2019, he joined the group of Prof. David R. Reichman at Columbia University as a postdoctoral research scholar where he is developing methods for condensed phase simulations with electron-phonon interactions. Joonho maintains an interest in electronic structure theory while trying to broaden his knowledge of quantum mechanics with applications towards quantum computing, condensed phase dynamics, and spectroscopy.
Austin Minnich, CaltechProfessor
Austin Minnich is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Applied Physics at the California Institute of Technology. He received his Bachelor’s degree from UC Berkeley in 2006 and his PhD from MIT in 2011, after which he started his position at Caltech. He is the recipient of a 2013 NSF CAREER Award, a 2015 ONR Young Investigator Award, a 2017 Director of Research Award from the Navy, the 2017 Junior Prize from the International Photothermal and Photoacoustics Association, the 2017 Bergles-Rohsenow Young Investigator Award, and a 2019 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers.
Robert Huang, IQIM, CaltechPh.D. student at Caltech
Robert is a Ph.D. student at Caltech supervised by John Preskill and Thomas Vidick. His research focuses on understanding the foundations for building classical and quantum machines that can learn from experiments and make accurate predictions in a quantum world. The mathematical tools for studying the potential and fundamental limitations stem from quantum information theory and high-dimensional probability.
Ryan Babbush, GoogleChief Quantum Algorithmist
Ryan started working with the Google Quantum AI Lab in 2013, when the team was only five people, and joined full time in 2015 after finishing his PhD at Harvard. Today, Ryan leads the quantum algorithms team at Google, which is focused on the development of new algorithms and applications of quantum computers and manages the quantum team's industrial collaborations. His research employs both physics and computer science methods in order to develop and analyze new approaches for applying quantum computers to problems in chemistry, applied mathematics, and machine learning. In addition to more theoretical work in quantum simulation and error-correction, his team focuses on experimentally implementing and testing new algorithms and error-mitigation strategies on noisy intermediate-scale superconducting qubit platforms.