ECE Assistant Professor Awarded Canada Research Chair in Quantum Software and Algorithms

Congratulations to ECE Assistant Professor Olivia Di Matteo on being awarded a Tier 2 Canada Research Chair (CRC) in Quantum Software and Algorithms! Tier 2 Chairs, tenable for five years and renewable once, are for exceptional emerging researchers, acknowledged by their peers as having the potential to lead in their field. For each Tier 2 Chair, the institution receives $100,000 annually for five years, with an additional $20,000 annual research stipend for first-term Tier 2 Chairs.

The CRC Program furthers the advancement of Canada’s research and development strategy. Chairholders improve our depth of knowledge and quality of life, strengthen Canada’s international competitiveness, and help train the next generation of highly skilled people through student supervision, teaching, and the coordination of other researchers’ work. To learn more about the CRC program, visit: https://research.ubc.ca/federal-research-chair-programs/canada-research-chairs. 

Read on to hear about our interview with Dr. Olivia Di Matteo, her work at ECE, and future research plans! 

How do you feel about being named a Canada Research Chair? 

I am both thrilled and stunned! 

Can you explain the process of selection for this nomination?

The nomination came as part of my faculty position, which I started in January 2022, but the actual application process began about 2 years ago. I had to write a grant proposal, which went through rounds of internal and external review. It was a bit intimidating since it was the first grant proposal I’d ever written, but the team at SPARC was extremely helpful, and colleagues in my department provided a lot of support as well.

What were some of your recent works that contributed to you being named as a CRC chair?

I’ve worked on many different topics, so it’s hard to pinpoint any one thing! But in particular, I’ve developed and implemented new methods for characterizing quantum systems, synthesizing quantum circuits, and applications of quantum computing in physics. I’ve also made many contributions to an open source quantum software framework, PennyLane, that other researchers use for their own work.

What does your current research look like? 

My group works on quantum software and algorithms, so the day-to-day is a lot of programming. On the software side, one area of focus is developing tools for automating and improving quantum compilation, which is the pipeline that translates high-level algorithms into the language of quantum hardware. On the algorithms side, we are exploring the potential use of qutrits (instead of qubits) in quantum algorithms and working on some techniques for noise mitigation.

What is something people wouldn’t expect about your research topic? 

That there are problems that are hard even for quantum computers. There’s a serious amount of hype around my field right now, and quantum computers are often presented as super-advanced machines that will solve every problem exponentially faster. There are definitely some specific (but important!) problems for which we expect this will be the case (once we overcome the major engineering hurdles of building them, of course). But there are classes of problems we believe will remain hard.

What are your future research plans? 

Lately, I’ve been diving into some applications of quantum computing to nuclear theory and particle physics, which has been really fun, since my training is actually as a physicist. The mapping of those problems to quantum algorithms in software through the compilation and optimization process is really interesting, and I’m hopeful that with some advances on the software front, we’ll soon be able to leverage the hardware to solve more realistic problems. I’m also thinking about how we can make quantum computing software more accessible (e.g., through better abstraction and helpful debugging tools) so that more people can use the technology in their own work.

To learn more about Dr. Olivia Di Matteo’s work, visit: https://ece.ubc.ca/olivia-di-matteo/

As we near the Fall semester, ECE is announcing the “Get to Know…” series, which is meant to introduce incoming students to the people in ECE and learn more about the ongoing research and work happening in ECE!

Dr. Mohammad Shahrad is an Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at UBC! Professor Shahrad’s research focuses on building resource-efficient cloud computing systems. He leads the UBC Cloud Infrastructure Research for Reliability, Usability, and Scalability (CIRRUS) lab. He has built novel scheduling schemes for different cloud workloads, modeled user-provider interactions to propose new pricing models, and built a new processor for efficient off-chip scalability of cloud workloads.

In this instalment, Professor Shahrad shares the course he will be teaching this fall, his research focus, and more!

Which course will you be teaching this semester?

The course that I’ll be teaching in the Fall is CPEN 221: Software Construction I

What interests you most about your research (cloud computing), and what drew you to this topic?

It is interdisciplinary, applied, and fast-moving.

Where is your favourite spot on campus?

The Neville Scarfe building, the southwestern corner (facing the Main Mall). The ivy on that wall has the most mesmerizing fall colours.

What is your favourite coffee/tea drink to order?

Rooibos tea

What is a fun fact about you that others might not know?

I am competitive at foosball.

Find out more about Assistant Professor Mohammad Shahrad’s research

On June 23, 2023, the TrustML Research Excellence cluster (https://trustml.ubc.ca) hosted a TrustML Workshop @ UBC, in the Fred Kaiser Building at the UBC Vancouver campus! This event drew over 100 attendees, with representatives from over 20 organizations, including University of Pennsylvania, IBM Research, Simon Fraser University, Duke University, Michigan State University, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, and more!

The TrustML cluster facilitates the development of trustworthy machine-learning-based systems: systems that are reliable, secure, explainable, and ethical. The purpose of the workshop was to bring together researchers and practitioners who share a common interest in this topic. The workshop encompassed a comprehensive program consisting of engaging lectures and tech briefing given by prominent speakers from the United States, China, and Canada. The event also included a highly-interactive poster session, where researchers discussed their work and fostered connections, contributing to the growth of our dynamic research community!

For more details about the event, see: https://trustml.ubc.ca/events/trustml-workshop-ubc-june-2023

Join ECE for this year’s Ian F. Blake Lectureship speaker, Professor Vahid Tarokh from Duke University, on Wednesday, May 10th at 11am PDT, online.

Tarokh’s lecture “Hypothesis Testing and Quickest Change Detection for Unnormalized Models” presents a fresh take on likelihood-based hypothesis testing, reflecting on first experiences with this topic from his graduate Digital Communications course taught by Ian Blake.

The celebrated Neyman-Pearson Lemma proves that this test is Universally Most Powerful for testing a null hypothesis versus an alternative one. Similarly, the CUSUM change detection is based on log-likelihood ratio and its optimality has been proved by Moustakides. In order to apply these optimal tests, we need to know the exact pdfs for both null and alternative (respectively pre and post change) distributions. These pdfs are not unfortunately easy to obtain in high dimensional data-driven scenarios. Recent research has demonstrated that energy, score-based and diffusion methods produce state of the art models in high-dimensional setting. Additionally, these models are extremely robust to potential noises in the collected data. Unfortunately, these models are unnormalized. Calculating the partition functions required for their normalization is a notoriously difficult problem. This limits their applicability to log-likelihood based tests.

This motivates our work where we have developed Fisher-inspired methods for hypothesis testing, quickest change detection, and their robust versions (when the hypotheses or pre- and post-change distributions may not be exactly known) for unnormalized models. We will discuss our results and demonstrate their applications to various scenarios including out of distribution detection.

About the speaker:
Vahid Tarokh received the PhD degree from the University of Waterloo in 1995 under the supervision of Ian F. Blake. He worked at AT&T Labs-Research until 2000. From 2000-2002, he was an Associate Professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). In 2002, he joined Harvard University as a Hammond Vinton Hayes Senior Fellow of Electrical Engineering and Perkins Professor of Applied Mathematics. He joined Duke University in Jan 2018, as the Rhodes Family Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He was also a Gordon Moore Distinguished Research Fellow at CALTECH in 2018. Between Jan 2019-Dec 2021, he was also a Microsoft Data Science Investigator at Duke University.

Please RSVP to attend and receive the Zoom link: https://ubc.ca1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_b3m9cLPhD7Pdbgi 

Welcome to Electrical and Computer Engineering Design and Innovation Day!

We are excited to share the projects our students have worked on over the final year of their undergraduate program! The capstone design project is a major component of the ECE engineering curriculum where students work in teams of four to six to design a product/service of significance and to solve an open-ended problem in electrical and computer engineering.

April 11th, 2:00-5:00pm

Fred Kaiser Building – 2332 Main Mall, UBC Campus – Atrium and Kaiser 2020/2030

https://design-innovation.apsc.ubc.ca/

Browse through our ECE projects and abstracts featured at Design + Innovation Day!

Facilitate Our Personal and Community Connection

Enhance How We Do Things

Improve How We Make Things

Leverage Data to Help Us Make Decisions

Map

Projects

2021-2022 Capstone Design and Innovation Day

Design and Innovation Day 2022: Winners, Projects, and Photos