News

Avi Wigderson, Herbert H. Maass Professor in the Institute for Advanced Study’s School of Mathematics, was named by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) as the recipient of the 2023 ACM A.M. Turing Award, often referred to as the "Nobel Prize of Computing." (Source: Institute for Advanced Study)

Dear friends,

Greetings from the Simons Institute! In this month’s newsletter, we’re showcasing highlights from recent workshops: a presentation by Dolev Bluvstein on recent advances in quantum information processing, and a talk by Mike Luby describing how erasure codes can address the lags and stalls that afflict cloud gaming and other applications carried out over networks.

Cloud gaming platforms such as Xbox Cloud Gaming and GeForce NOW can experience stalls, lags, jitter, and pixelation when delivered over wireless networks such as Wi-Fi, 5G, and Starlink. In this talk from the workshop on Application-Driven Coding Theory, Mike Luby (BitRipple) describes solutions that eliminate these issues, providing a much improved end-user experience. These solutions enable interactive applications such as cloud gaming, AR/VR, teleoperation of drones and robots, and remote collaboration, and they are easy to integrate into existing services.

Suppressing errors is one of the central challenges for useful quantum computing, requiring quantum error correction for large-scale processing. But the overhead in the realization of error-corrected “logical” qubits, where information is encoded across many physical qubits for redundancy, poses significant challenges to large-scale logical quantum computing. In this talk from the recent workshop on Advances in Quantum Coding Theory, Dolev Bluvstein (Harvard University) discusses recent advances in quantum information processing using dynamically reconfigurable arrays of neutral atoms, where physical qubits are encoded in long-lived hyperfine states and entangling operations are realized by coherent excitation into Rydberg states.

Dear friends,

I am delighted to announce that Sampath Kannan will be the next associate director of the Simons Institute. His official appointment begins July 1, 2024. 

Think about the last time you faced a problem you couldn’t solve. Say it was something practical, something that originally seemed small — a leaky faucet, for example. You’re about to give up and call a plumber, but first you want to see whether you’re close. Maybe it really is easy to fix the problem, and you just need to know where to look. Or maybe it’s far more difficult than you think. So now you’re trying to solve a new problem, a meta-problem: instead of fixing the leaky faucet, you’re trying to figure out how hard it will be to fix the leaky faucet. 

Greetings from Berkeley, where we are deep into a pair of interconnected research programs on Quantum Algorithms, Complexity, and Fault Tolerance and on Error-Correcting Codes: Theory and Practice.

Presented by John Wright (UC Berkeley), this boot camp talk offers an introduction to quantum codes, aimed at a general (not-necessarily-quantum) audience. Wright begins with a brief introduction to quantum computing, and then introduces the powerful family of quantum codes known as CSS codes.

Last month, our two closely related research programs on quantum computing and on error-correcting codes (ECC) held a joint boot camp. On the ECC side, one of the highlights was a three-part tutorial on Probabilistic and Combinatorial Methods, presented by Jonathan Mosheiff (Ben-Gurion University). We’re pleased to share Part I with you here.

I’ve temporarily moved to Berkeley, California, where I am the “science communicator in residence” at the Simons Institute, the world’s leading institute for collaborative research in theoretical computer science. One nano-collaboration is today’s puzzle – told to me by a computer scientist at Microsoft I befriended over tea. It’s about data centres – those warehouses containing endless rows of computers that store all our data.