CERN Sponsors Free Lecture Series on Quantum Computing

CERN is sponsoring a series of free webcasts on quantum computing. The talks, which do not require knowledge of quantum physics, are designed for computer scientists and will focus on practical aspects of quantum computing. The speaker is Professor Elias Fernandez-Combarro Alvarez of the University of Oviedo, Spain Computer Science Department.

According to the announcement at the CERN website, the series “...introduces basic concepts of the quantum circuit model (qubits, gates, and measures) and important quantum algorithms and protocols, including those that can be implemented with a few qubits (BB84, quantum teleportation, superdense coding, etc.), as well as those that require multi-qubit systems (Deutsch-Jozsa, Grover, Shor, etc.). Some of the most recent applications of quantum computing in the fields of optimization and simulation will be addressed (with special emphasis on the use of quantum annealing, the quantum approximate optimization algorithm, and the variational quantum eigensolver), along with quantum machine learning (for instance, through the use of quantum support vector machines and quantum variational classifiers). Examples of how these techniques can be used in chemistry simulations and high-energy physics problems will also be provided.”

The weekly series began on November 6. A video of the first lecture is available at the CERN website. The next installment is on November 13, and later lectures will occur on subsequent Fridays.