Speaker
Description
This talk requires no particular technical background. We start with an overview of the history of the quantum formalism and fundamental quantum concepts, leading into the quantum picturalism program [1, 2, 3], the use of which has recently become wide-spread in quantum industry. At the same time, we report on compelling empirical evidence on its educational value [4]. Meanwhile, some governments around the world are already starting to adopt Quantum in Pictures [3] as a basis for secondary school quantum education.
One particular new application that has emerged from quantum picturalism is interpretable quantum AI [5]. Basically, linguistic structures have canonical representations as quantum processes: one could say that language is quantum-native, a bit like chemistry. The same analogy also has resulted in BQP-hard quantum algorithms for things like question-answering [6]. We also have experimental demonstrations of these on our H2 quantum computers [7], where in particular we witness `compositional generalisation’ when training, hence avoiding issues many QML approaches have to deal with. We end with a musical note [8].
[1] Bob Coecke (2010) Quantum picturalism. Contemporary physics, 51(1), 59-83.
[2] Bob Coecke and Aleks Kissinger (2017) Picturing Quantum Processes. Cambridge University Press.
[3] Bob Coecke and Stefano Gogioso (2022) Quantum in Pictures. Quantinuum.
[4] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/dec/16/physicist-bob-coecke-its-easier-to-convince-kids-than-adults-about-quantum-mechanics
[5] https://www.forbes.com/sites/moorinsights/2021/10/13/cambridge-quantum-makes-quantum-natural-language-processing-a-reality/
[6] Tuomas Laakkonen, Konstantinos Meichanetzidis and Bob Coecke (2024) Quantum Algorithms for Compositional Text Processing. Forthcoming.
[7] Tiffany Duneau, Saskia Bruhn, Gabriel Matos, Tuomas Laakkonen, Katerina Saiti, Anna Pearson, Konstantinos Meichanetzidis and Bob Coecke (2024) Scalable and interpretable quantum natural language processing: an implementation on trapped ions. Forthcoming.
[8] Eduardo Miranda, Richie Yeung, Anna Pearson, Konstantinos Meichanetzidis and Bob Coecke (2022). A quantum natural language processing approach to musical intelligence. In Quantum Computer Music: Foundations, Methods and Advanced Concepts (pp. 313-356). Springer.
