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Within the last few years, quantum computing has moved from an academic field of study to a blossoming industry with a healthy ecosystem comprised of startups as well as research groups at large corporations. In this talk we will give a general introduction to this topic, describe a selection of the currently competing hardware platforms and demonstrate how to program a near term quantum computer.
Nikolas Tezak is a Quantum Engineer and Software Engineer at Rigetti Computing in Berkeley. There he has worked at many levels of their hardware and software stack. Most recently he has contributed to the compiler toolchain which translates abstract quantum programs into control hardware instructions.
He joined Rigetti in 2016 after obtaining a PhD from Stanford's Department of Applied Physics. At Stanford he worked with Professor Hideo Mabuchi, studying Quantum Feedback Networks theoretically and computationally and exploring applications for them.
Dr. Tezak will be joined by Robert Smith, the Director of Software Architecture at Rigetti Computing.
He designed a formalism underlying a portable instruction set called Quil that runs on Rigetti's quantum computers. Additionally, he has worked on developing high-performance gate-model simulation, and he has made heavy contributions to one of the first production-grade optimizing quantum compilers. He joined Rigetti in 2016 after having worked in fields ranging from microwave holography to programming language theory.
