Seeking Quantum Advantage: Workshop and Conference

Merton College Oxford. September 2nd – 5th 2024

A one week residential event in Oxford’s historic Merton College, where experts will gather to debate the challenges and opportunities in the worldwide effort to achieve general Quantum Advantage.

Schedule and Talk Titles

Click here to open or close the detailed schedule

You can sign up for punting HERE and can also recommend questions for the debate session.

  • Zoë Holmes: Does provable absence of barren plateaus imply classical simulability?
  • Eric Anschuetz: Arbitrary Polynomial Separations in Trainable Quantum Machine Learning
  • John Morton: The role of silicon in quantum computing
  • Keisuke Fujii: Early FTQC: closing the gap between NISQ and FTQC
  • Ying Li: Classical codes in constructing fault-tolerant quantum circuits
  • Ash Vadgama: Update on the National Quantum Computing Centre’s (NQCC) Programme
  • Chris Monroe: Co-Design of Quantum Apps to Hardware
  • Roland Matt: All-electronic trapped-ion quantum computing architecture
  • Suguru Endo: Quantum error mitigation towards fault-tolerance
  • Christian Gogolin: Building blocks for quantum computing for chemistry
  • Kristan Temme: With fault tolerance the ultimate goal, error mitigation is the path that gets quantum computing to usefulness
  • Yihui Quek: The Signal and the (Quantum) noise
  • Earl Campbell: Real-time decoding in hardware
  • Nicholas Harrigan: Accelerated Quantum Supercomputing at NVIDIA
  • Alexander Schmidhuber: Quartic quantum speedups for planted inference
  • Daniel Lidar: Demonstration of algorithmic quantum speedup
  • Sophia Economou: Adaptive and pulse-based quantum algorithms
  • Xiao Yuan: Quantum Advantage for Near-Term and Fault-Tolerant Quantum Computers
  • Tom Manovitz: New quantum opportunities with neutral atom arrays: analog, digital, and error-corrected
  • Constantin Dalyac: Probing for quantum advantage with neutral atoms
  • Joseph Bowles: Scalable training of large quantum machine learning models
  • Josh Nunn: ORCA Computing: early applications on the path to fault tolerance
  • Robbie King: Learning with exponentially fewer samples using quantum memory
  • Ryan Babbush: Optimization by decoded quantum interferometry (arXiv:2408.08292)

Confirmed speakers and panelists

Divinity Schools, Venue for the public-facing panel debate.

Invited long talks

  • Ryan Babbush 
  • Earl Campbell
  • Sophia Economou 
  • Keisuke Fujii
  • Daniel Lidar
  • Zoë Holmes
  • Tom Manovitz
  • Chris Monroe 
  • John Morton 
  • Kristan Temme

Evening debates

  • Robin Blume-Kohout
  • Harry Buhrman
  • Toby Cubitt
  • Christian Gogolin
  • Zoë Holmes
  • Nathan Wiebe 

Invited shorter talks

  • Eric Anschuetz
  • Joseph Bowles
  • Constantin Dalyac
  • Suguru Endo
  • Christian Gogolin
  • Nicholas Harrigan
  • Robbie King
  • Ying Li
  • Josh Nunn
  • Roland Matt
  • Yihui Quek
  • Alexander Schmidhuber
  • Ash Vadgama
  • Xiao Yuan

Poster Session and OQC Poster Prize

The poster session will be held on Tuesday 3rd Sept between 17:00 – 19:30. Poster boards will be available after 13:00 to mount posters during the afternoon. Please use an A0 Portrait format. Printing posters is not possible in Merton College but in Oxford centre there may be several options, one example is Ryman.

Oxford Quantum Circuits (OQC) have generously offered to create a Poster Prize of £500 to award the most outstanding young researcher’s poster. All students (undergraduate and postgraduate) and early career researchers who are within 4 years since completion of their doctorate are eligible to nominate themselves for this prize. If you meet the eligibility criteria and would like to nominate yourself then please get in touch at conference@seeqa.org by 26th August to submit your poster (later submissions will be possible but consideration will not be guaranteed).

UPDATE: congratulations to our poster prize winners Martina Nibbi (Technical University of Munich) and Sofiene Jerbi (Freie Universität Berlin).

Listen, Present and Discuss

Lectures and presentations from world-leading experts. 150 participants, 10 invited long talks and 14 shorter talks.

Tackle challenges together

Merton College offers plenty of space in its scenic gardens and traditional seminar rooms for chats and meetings at all scales.

The latest theory and experiments

The event has an emphasis on practical theory, while covering the most exciting experimental progress in various systems.

Evening debates

The event features an evening debate that tackles key controversy with speakers for and against.

Residential in Merton College

Stay in Merton, one of Oxford’s most beautiful colleges, with breakfast and dinner in the College’s beautiful Hall.

Explore the Dreaming Spires

Beautiful walks, punting on the river, and countless historic colleges, museums and libraries.

Key Themes and Topics

  • Early fault tolerance and Error mitigation
  • Hybrid algorithms
  • Benchmarking and quantifying progress
  • Is there QA in Chemistry?
  • QC to augment emerging classical methods
  • Randomized protocols and classical shadows
  • Emulation, and Dequantizing Algorithms

Talks and Perspectives

As increasingly large investments are made into commercial quantum computing efforts, how should we view the prospects for the field: Can over-hype be avoided to keep goals attainable?

Registration

If you would like to sign up to our waiting list then please email us at conference@seeqa.org. If you are already registered but need financial help with accommodation or travel then please do get in touch with us at conference@seeqa.org and explain your conditions. Please note that we can only offer refunds for cancellations received before Friday 16th Aug.

Accommodations in Merton College have been fully booked out. Please check HERE to see if nearby Colleges have availability.


Organisers

Oxford

  • Prof Simon Benjamin
  • Dr Bálint Koczor,
  • Dr Zhenyu Cai

Bristol

  • Prof Noah Linden
  • Dr Paul Skrzypczyk

UCL

  • Prof Dan Browne
  • Dr Armands Strikis

Contact: conference@seeqa.org