Testing Quantum Devices and Quantum Mechanics
Dr. Umesh Vazirani spoke to the Forum about the tremendous recent progress in the physical realization of devices based on the principles of quantum mechanics which also throw up a fundamental challenge: how to test quantum devices, which are by nature imperfect and susceptible to uncontrollable faults.
Speaker Profile
Umesh Vazirani is the Roger A. Strauch Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley, and the director of the Berkeley Quantum Computation Center.
Vazirani is one of the founders of the field of quantum computing. His 1993 paper with his student Ethan Bernstein on quantum complexity theory defined a model of quantum Turing machines which was amenable to complexity based analysis. This paper also gave an algorithm for the quantum Fourier transform, which was then used by Peter Shor within a year in his celebrated quantum algorithm for factoring integers. He received a BS from MIT in 1981 and received his Ph.D. in 1986 from UC Berkeley.