About

I'm a PhD student at Michigan State University in the department of Computational Mathematics, Science, and Engineering (CMSE), also pursuing a dual PhD in Physics. In 2017, I received a B.S. with Distinction in Physics and Mathematics from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

I do research in quantum computing and quantum information science. I'm interested in both the physics of computation and the computation of physics -- that is, what quantum physics can tell us about information and computer science, and how quantum computers can solve practical problems in physics and related fields.

News

2020
  • (03-23-2020) Nothing can stop the QuIC Seminar! We're moving to virtual seminars until the COVID-19 situation mitigates. While the first seminar today by Danny Paz on decoherence will only be open to MSU, we hope to make the seminars (or recordings) available to everyone in the future. Check the QuIC Seminar page for updates.
  • (03-03-2020) Check out our new arXiv pre-print on Robust data encodings for quantum classifiers. This joint work with Brian Coyle builds off my talk from QTML 2019. We show how data encodings determine learnable decision boundaries for a binary quantum classifier, and investigate how different encodings behave in the presence of noise. Feedback, as always, is welcome!
  • (02-26-2020) The first virtual QuIC Seminar was today! I called into MSU from California to talk about quantum supremacy. We wrote supremacy circuits in Cirq and tried to simulate them... No one was able to beat Sycamore :) Please see the slides on the QuIC Seminar page.
  • (02-17-2020) Today I started as an intern in the Quantum Residency program at Alphabet X (formerly Google X). I'm excited to start my internship project and see all the interesting things the group is working on.
  • (02-10-2020) Greetings from the first Rigetti Developer/Partner Conference "Advantage 2020." I presented a short talk with new VQLS results on their Aspen-7 lattices. You can find the slides on my publications page. 
  • (02-08-2020) Today I presented my a poster on VQLS at SQuInT. You can see the poster on my publications page.
  • (02-06-2020) I helped out with an awesome Python bootcamp (for non-engineers) at Google in New York, NY. The bootcamp was very similar to the MSU course CMSE 201: Intro to computational modeling, except the bootcamp did 8 weeks of that course in 8 hours!  From indexing lists to machine learning with TensorFlow in one day was fun.
  • (02-01-2020) Today I gave a talk at FOSDEM 2020 in the Quantum Computing Devroom, titled "Quantum classifiers, robust data encodings, and software to implement them." I was jet-lagged and stumbling and said "uhh" about ten million times, but the slides are ok. Good reminder to continue working on public speaking.
  • (01-30-2020) Greetings from the AFIT/AFRL Quantum Computing Short Course in Dayton, Ohio! Today I gave a brief research seminar on "Quantum subspace expansion and simultaneous measurements." When the video is uploaded, I will link it here.
  • (01-11-2020) I'm very excited to work with Will Zeng and collaborators as a part-time Technical Member of Unitary Labs, the in-house research/software-development team of the Unitary Fund. We'll be researching new methods for error mitigation and building an open-source toolkit to tackle the biggest obstacle challenging quantum computers: noise.
2019
  • (10-28-2019) Today I gave a guest lecture on "quantum algorithms for linear systems of equations" at Stanford for the course CME250Q: Introduction to quantum computing and quantum algorithms. Thanks to the course instructor Rahul Sarkar for inviting me! Once I type my lecture notes, I will link them here. This concludes my quantum adventure of three talks in three different timezones in nine days. I'm exhausted but thankful for the opportunities.
  • (10-22-2019) Greetings from Daejon, Korea! My talk at QTML on "Robust data encodings for quantum classifiers" went fairly well, and I enjoyed hearing other presentations, particularly from Nana Liu and Jarrod McClean. If interested, you can see my slides on this page.
  • (10-19-2019) The two-day MSU-IBM Quantum Computing Bootcamp with Qiskit was, I'd say, a great success! Please check out our tutorial notebooks and talks at https://github.com/rmlarose/qcbq. Congrats to the top three projects (3. Simulating the SSH model, 2. Compiling single qubit gates to {H, T}, and 1. Implementing the projected cooling algorithm in Qiskit and running it on hardware) and a huge thank you to Huey-Wen Lin for helping me organize the event. Thanks as well as all our sponsors -- IBM, EeroQ, and (from MSU) CMSE, CORE-CM, Natural Science, and Engineering.
  • (09-06-2019) The first QuIC Seminar of the semester was today! This is our third semester in a row and I'm thrilled with our growth in interest and attendance. I will continue to help develop materials for this semester, but since I'll be away the seminar will be run by the great Justine Lane, Ben Hall, and Niyaz Beysengulov.
  • (08-31-2019) I'm excited to spend my Fall Semester with the NASA QuAIL group in sunny Mountain View, California! Here, I'll be working on device-tailored quantum compiling, QAOA applications, and error mitigation.
  • (08-09-2019) Prompted by the great Travis Scholten, I put my secret list of "NISQ Implementations" online at https://github.com/rmlarose/nisq-implementations. I've kept this out of personal interest and to study progression in the field, and I figured it could be of use to others. Please contribute your references! We're currently at 75+ and counting.
  • (06-09-2019) Greetings from Maryland! College Park is a cool city and NISQ 2019 is a great conference. I presented a poster (same one from QIP 2019) and particularly enjoyed the talks of Dave Bacon, Elizabeth Crosson, David Gosset, and Ashley Montanero. Check out the conference website for videos of all talks. I always thank the conference organizers, but I thought NISQ 2019 was exceptionally well-organized. Thanks also to the organizers for the student travel support.
  • (05-02-2019) My second year of graduate school is in the books! My final project for Physics 855/955: (Relativistic) Quantum Field Theory, was on quantum algorithms for simulating scalar quantum fields. If interested, you can check out my code on notebook viewer or see my slides for a presentation of the method & results. I also finally made a teaching portfolio as a project in Dr. Joyce Parker's great course, Teaching College Science. In two days I leave for New York to start as a Quantum Computing Applications Researcher Intern at IBM Q. 
  • (04-10-2019) I received a Future Academic Scholars in Teaching (FAST) Fellowship from The Graduate School at Michigan State University. The $2k will be used to support curriculum development for a quantum computing course at MSU as well as education research in quantum information science.
  • (04-07-2019) Yesterday I spent the day at the MSU Science Festival, a fantastic outreach event that happens every year at MSU. We communicated the fun of quantum mechanics and quantum computing with magnets levitating above superconductors and superconducting  qubits  via the IBM Quantum Experience. May thanks to Dr. Johannes Pollanen and the LHQS for putting this together. [Group photo.]
  • (03-05-2019) My first talk at APS March wasn't a disaster! despite not starting to prepare until Sunday. (Qiskit camp.) You can find my slides here and on my publications page.
  • (03-02-2019) I attended the first Qiskit camp held by IBM Research, where my team won the judges' first prize for implementing analytic quantum gradient descent in Qiskit Aqua! (Pull request coming soon, plus future work on higher order gradients for optimization.) I'm now in Boston for APS March, where I'll be giving a talk about quantum computer programming and quantum software on Tuesday. (Session F27, Room 160C @ 1:03 pm.)
  • (02-23-2019) I'm honored to have been awarded one of five Disciplinary Leadership Fellowships from the College of Graduate Students at Michigan State University. The $2k fellowship will be used to directly support the QuIC Seminar and other quantum events at MSU.
  • (01-20-2019) I'll be giving a talk on NISQAI's initial directions and design philosophy at the first ever Quantum Computing Devroom at FOSDEM 2019 in Brussels, Belgium on Sunday, February 3rd. (Slides)
  • (01-20-2019) QIP 2019 was a blast! I had a great time presenting my poster, seeing new research, and attending the after hour shenanigans. Thanks to the conference itself for providing student support and CMSE for covering the rest of the expenses for me to attend.
2018
  • (12-28-2018) Next summer (2019), I'll be a Quantum Computing Applications Research Intern at IBM Research in Yorktown Heights, NY. I'm very excited to work with some of the best in the business on quantum algorithms.
  • (12-12-2018) Thanks to EeroQ, I attended Day 3 of Quantum to Business 2018 at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA. Huge thanks to the generous Nick Farina and Johannes Pollanen for the invite and support!
  • (10-24-2018) Another pre-print from the LANL Quantum Computing Summer School has been finished! Here, we design a new variational algorithm for quantum state diagonalization and discuss applications ranging from condensed matter physics to machine learning. (Link to paper.)
  • (09-20-2018) My proposal, along with Yousif Almulla, Nic Ezzell, Joe Iosue, and Arkin Tikku, for NISQAI was one of five recipients of the Unitary Fund Grant. More information about this project can be found on our GitHub page.
  • (08-17-2018) My poster "Quantum-assisted quantum compiling" won the Outstanding Poster Presentation in Physics award at the Los Alamos National Laboratory 2018 Student Symposium. This poster was based on the paper written during the summer school. 
  • (08-12-2018) I received a travel scholarship from the Erwin Schrödinger Institute for Mathematics and Physics to attend the 2018 YQIS Conference and CoQuS Summer School at the University of Vienna from September 17-21. 
  • (07-02-2018) We have published our first paper at the LANL Quantum Computing Summer School, Quantum assisted quantum compiling, where we use quantum computers themselves to compile quantum algorithms.
  • (06-22-2018) My paper "Overview and comparison of gate level quantum software platforms" is now featured on Quantum Computing Report in the Scorecards section. (arXiv link here.)
  • (04-14-2018) I presented my work on classically simulating quantum computers at the APS April 2018 meeting. The slides and paper can be found on this page.
  • (02-18-2018) I was one of ten students internationally awarded the first ever 2018 Quantum Computing Summer School Fellowship from Los Alamos National Lab. I'll be spending ten weeks at Los Alamos this summer doing research in quantum computing.
  • (02-17-2018) I presented some of my research at the 10th annual Graduate Academic Conference at Michigan State University. A pdf of my presentation, titled Quantum Teleportation with Photons, can be found on this page.
2017
  • (11-30-2017) I gave a talk on how timing qubits can simplify an optical simulation of the quantum teleportation circuit  at the Quantum Information Processing Seminar at the University of Michigan.
  • (11-27-2017) We are CMSE, a short video about MSU's new department, has been released!​