The 6th Annual SCI Summer Research Colloquium will take place via virtual conferencing on Friday, August 7th, 2020.

Register to participate here.

Presenter Instructions

• Please download and use this template and follow all instructions theirin.
• The deadline for abstract submission to be considered for an oral presentation is 5:00 PM, Wednesday, July 15, 2020.
• After this deadline all abstracts will be considered for poster presentations only.
• You will be notified via email if you have been selected as an oral presenter by July 22, 2020.
• Submissions that are not selected for oral presentation will automatically be considered for poster presentation.
• The deadline for poster presentation submissions is 5:00 PM, Friday, July 31, 2020.
• Most submitted abstracts are typically selected for posters; poster presentation details are TBD due to this year’s unique virtual format. More details on this to follow soon!

Last fall, a team at Google announced the first-ever demonstration of "quantum computational supremacy"---that is, a clear quantum speedup over a classical computer for some task---using a 53-qubit programmable superconducting chip called Sycamore. Google's accomplishment drew on a decade of research in my field of quantum complexity theory. This talk will discuss questions like: what exactly was the (contrived) problem that Sycamore solved? How does one verify the outputs using a classical computer? And how confident are we that the problem is classically hard---especially in light of subsequent counterclaims by IBM and others? I'll end with a possible application for Google's experiment---namely, the generation of trusted public random bits, for use (for example) in cryptocurrencies---that I've been developing and that Google and NIST are now working to test. Bio: Scott Aaronson is David J. Bruton Centennial Professor of Computer Science at the University of Texas at Austin. He received his bachelor's from Cornell University and his PhD from UC Berkeley. Before coming to UT Austin, he spent nine years as a professor in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT. Aaronson's research in theoretical computer science has focused mainly on the capabilities and limits of quantum computers. His first book, Quantum Computing Since Democritus, was published in 2013 by Cambridge University Press. He received the National Science Foundation’s Alan T. Waterman Award, the United States PECASE Award, and the Tomassoni-Chisesi Prize in Physics.

 

About

The Smalley-Curl Institute (SCI) Summer Research Colloquium began in 1986 as the RQI Colloquium, and has taken place in August of each year since then.  The purpose of the SCI Summer Research Colloquium is to provide undergraduates, graduate students, and postdoctoral researchers working at Rice with an opportunity to present their most recent work. 

Presentations - either talks or posters - are formal, as in professional international conferences. However, the audience, consisting of Rice students and faculty members, as well as R&D representatives from local companies, is very informal and friendly, which makes the Colloquium a great occasion for honing the presenters' communications skills.

Some abstracts by graduate students and post-docs will be selected for oral presentations, to be presented throughout the day.  Most of the submitted abstracts are selected for posters, which are presented in two separate sessions.