Entangled Things

In Episode 57, Patrick and Ciprian speak with Jake Yocom-Piatt, Co-Founder and Project Lead for Decred and CEO of Company-0.The team discuss Cryptocurrency, Encryption Standards, and the threat of Quantum Computing to the blockchain.Jake Yocom-Piatt is a Co-Founder & Project Lead for Decred (www.decred.org). He is a cryptocurrency pioneer who has been using, funding and directing the creation of open-source software for 10+ years and has been featured as an expert source for a variety of publications, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Coindesk, and many more. Prior to Decred, Jake funded and oversaw the creation of btcsuite, an alternative full-node Bitcoin implementation written in go, whose source code has been used in several other notable projects, e.g. Lightning Network (lnd), Ethereum, and Factom. He also is a co-creator of zkc, a high-security asynchronous chat system.

In Episode 56, Patrick and Ciprian speak with Himadri Majumdar, Co-Founder and Chief Executive of SemiQon.The team discuss semiconductor based quantum technologies, error correction, improvement of operating temperature ranges, and the benefit of research centers such as VTT.Himadri Majumdar is the Co-founder and chief executive of SemiQon. SemiQon builds silicon-based quantum processors for the million-qubit era. Prior to co-founding SemiQon he was the Program Manager for Quantum Technologies at VTT. In his role he helped companies in quantum technology domain - especially fabless start-ups - to utilize VTT’s R&D expertise and infrastructure in quantum technologies. Himadri was also a founding member of the Finnish Quantum technologies ecosystem, InstituteQ, and led the business arm of the ecosystem, BusinessQ. His ambition is to see SemiQon, and quantum technology in general, becoming a Finnish and global success story through cooperation and strategic partnerships. Himadri has 20 years of experience in innovation and innovation management and is also trained as an experimental physicist. SemiQon’s mission is to realise the promise of quantum computing by delivering scalability through powerful, resilient, and cost-effective quantum processors. SemiQon’s technology builds upon decades of development and know-how from the semiconductor industry, making its silicon processors commercially competitive and well-suited for mass-manufacturing. SemiQon is a spin-off from VTT, Finland and it operates at the Micronova Center for Applied Micro and Nanotechnology in Espoo, Finland.

In Episode 55, Patrick and Ciprian speak with Dr. Vincent Berk, Chief Strategist at Quantum Xchange.The team discuss Quantum safe encryption, improvements to security with Quantum Computing, hybrid problem solving, and risk management.Dr. Vincent Berk is currently the Chief Strategy Officer at Quantum Xchange. Recognized as a highly technical cybersecurity executive and industry thought leader, Vince is also a successful entrepreneur and academic. He founded and led FlowTraq, an enterprise network security and analytics company from conception to acquisition and served as a computer science faculty member at the prestigious Dartmouth College. Dr. Berk has a Ph.D. in machine learning and large-scale data analytics from Leiden University and holds several patents in the application of data analysis in cybersecurity and network performance.

In Episode 54, Patrick and Ciprian take a retrospective look at the past two years of Entangled Things.The team discuss the perhaps unlikely success of the format, learning to trust the math, recent chipset releases, and the surprises of the past two years.

In Episode 53, Patrick and Ciprian speak with Dr. Johannes Oberreuter, Data Science Technical Lead at Machine Learning Reply.Among other topics, the team discuss classical neural networks, quantum networks, hybrid approaches, and the ongoing reduction of resource needs and improving accuracy of neural networks.Dr. Johannes Oberreuter works as a Data Science Technical Lead at Machine Learning Reply and he is co-leading the Quantum Computing practice in Reply. He has been studying physics and mathematics in Munich (Diploma of Physics), Heidelberg and Cambridge (Master of Advanced Study in Mathematics) and has obtained his PhD in theoretical physics at the university of Amsterdam on quantum effects in the early universe. He has also conducted research at the University of Göttingen and TU Munich on quantum dynamics.

In Episode 52, Patrick and Ciprian speak with returning guest Todd Brun of the University of Southern California.Among other topics, the team discuss error correction, non-Markovian errors, the limitations of current quantum processors and the battle between numbers of Qubits and amounts of noise.Todd Brun is a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Physics, and Computer Science at the University of Southern California.  He does research on quantum theory, especially on the problems of quantum computing and quantum information science.  Prof. Brun received his Ph.D. in Physics from Caltech in 1994, and did postdoctoral work at the University of London (Queen Mary and Westfield College), the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara, Carnegie Mellon University, and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, before starting at USC in 2003.

In Episode 51, Patrick and Ciprian speak with Shai Zacaraev, Dean in the Upper School at the Dwight-Englewood School.Among other topics, the team discuss teaching quantum to high school students, working past biases and restrictions of existing knowledge, and the speed of growth in technology.Dr. Shai Zacaraev is a Dean in the Upper School at the Dwight-Englewood School in Englewood, NJ. He has had multiple careers over the years that have spanned the gamut across technology, finance, and education. He holds an undergraduate degree and Masters in computer and information science from Brooklyn College, a Masters in education leadership from Columbia University and a doctorate in educational and organizational leadership from the University of Pennsylvania. He is currently teaching a course on Quantum algorithms as an advanced elective to high school students. This is a course he developed with the help of one of his old professors (Professor Yanofsky, a previous guest here) and has been able to refine it over the years. He is looking forward to discussing the course on this podcast and begin to rethink when and what we are introducing to our students as they grow in this fast paced, ever evolving technological age, where change is the new norm.

In Episode 50, Patrick and Ciprian delve into the hype surrounding Quantum.The team discuss Sabine Hossenfelder's recent video regarding the Quantum Hype Bubble, and separating the understanding of real advancements from media bias.

In Episode 49, Patrick and Ciprian take a look at the Nobel Prize in Physics.The team discuss Entanglement, some of the other scientific achievements that set the stage, and the implications of bringing Quantum topics to the forefront of scientific discussion.

In Episode 48, Patrick and Ciprian speak with returning guest Bob Coecke, Chief Scientist at Quantinuum. Among other topics, the team discuss modern paths into Quantum, the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics, and the possibility of a Quantum Winter.Bob Coecke is Chief Scientist at Cambridge Quantum / Quantinuum.  He also heads the Oxford-based Compositional Intelligence & Quantum NLP team and is Emeritus Professor at Wolfson College, Oxford University. Previously, he was Professor of Quantum Foundations, Logics and Structures at the Computer Science department at Oxford University, where he was for 20 years, and co-founded, built, and led a multi-disciplinary research group of up to 50 people. He supervised 66 PhD students. He pioneered Categorical Quantum Mechanics (now in AMS's MSC2020 classification), ZX-calculus, DisCoCat natural language meaning, mathematical foundations for resource theories, Quantum Natural Language Processing, and is co-author of Picturing Quantum Processes, a book providing a fully diagrammatic treatment of quantum theory and its applications. He co-authored close to 200 research papers. He's a founding father of the QPL (Quantum Physics and Logic) and ACT (Applied Category Theory) communities, the diamond open access journal Compositionality, and Cambridge University Press' Applied Category Theory book series. He was the first person to have Quantum Foundations as part of his professorial title. His work headlined in various media outlets, including Forbes, New Scientist, PhysicsWorld, ComputerWeekly.