Rui Soares Barbosa

Rui Soares Barbosa is a Research Assistant in the Quantum Group at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Oxford, as well as a Junior Research Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford. Rui received a BSc in Computer Science from Universidade do Minho in 2009, having spent a semester at Universiteit Utrecht, and an MSc in Mathematics and the Foundations of Computer Science from the University of Oxford in 2010. He then read for a DPhil in Computer Science under the supervision of Samson Abramsky and Andreas Döring at Oxford, spending short spells as a visitor at Université Paris Diderot (Paris 7) and at Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. He completed his thesis, Contextuality in quantum mechanics and beyond, in 2015, and has since that year been employed as a post-doctoral researcher in the same group. Recently, he started working on a joint project between Oxford and University College London on Contextuality as a resource in quantum computation. His research lies in the porous frontier between theoretical computer science and the foundations of physics. It focuses on achieving a structural and systematic understanding of non-locality and contextuality, phenomena predicted by quantum theory that set it apart from classical physical theories, by employing methods that have proved useful in computer science. The aim is to shed light on our understanding of the logic of quantum systems, and to investigate how their weird properties may be regarded as resources providing an advantage for several computational and information-processing tasks. This also has a feedback effect leading to new connections with established areas of computer science and other disciplines where similar ‘contextual’ structures arise.