Quantum@LIACS

About me

I am a Professor in quantum computing at the Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science, Leiden University and a co-founder and lead of the Applied Quantum Algorithms - Leiden interdepartmental initiative.

My interests lie in a broad spectrum of quantum computing topics. For the last few years, I have been fascinated with the intersection of quantum computing, machine learning, and artificial intelligence.

In particular, I am interested in:

Quantum-enhanced machine learning

What aspects of machine learning and AI benefit the most from quantum computers?

From low polynomial improvements for various aspects of machine learning, reinforcement learning and AI, to more exotic learning algorithms for many-body physics problems with a potentially BQP-complete flavor and exponential speed-ups, this research line investigates the perspectives and limitations of quantum enhancements for machine learning and AI.

More recently, I have been fascinated with the potential of quantum machine learning to provide the next strides in discovering new physics.

Quantum-applied machine learning

Will advanced AI techniques be indespensible in building scalable quantum computers? 

Modern machine learning and AI methods which can exploit ever-growing amounts of data may  become vital tools to help us come up with new creative and counter-intuitive solutions to problems that arise in quantum computing.

Quantum heuristics

How can quantum computing help solve ubiquitous yet hard computational problems?

Not everything useful has useful lower bounds, and very often, especially in ever more important AI domains, heuristics and in particular quantum heuristic methods will be the only way to go.