New subject: [Aspuru-Guzik Group List] Group meeting today, 2:30 PM, Div Room

18 Jan 2016

Dear All,

Postdoctoral candidate Cyril Stark will be visiting tomorrow. As part of
his visit he will give a talk at the
*2:30 in the Division Room.* Talk tittle and abstract is below:

Title: Learning quantum models for arbitrary datasets

Abstract: In this talk I address the problem of simultaneously learning
unknown quantum states and unknown quantum measurements from empirical
data. This task goes beyond conventional state tomography because we are
not assuming anything about the measurement devices. I am going to talk
about the time complexity and sample complexity of the inference of states
and measurements, and I am going to talk about the robustness of the
minimal Hilbert space dimension under measurement uncertainty. Moreover, I
will describe a very simple heuristic algorithm (alternating optimization)
to fit states and measurements to empirical data. For this algorithm to
work the dataset does not need to be generated by a physical system. Hence,
the proposed algorithm enables us to interpret arbitrary datasets from a
quantum perspective. By analyzing movie ratings, we evaluate the power of
quantum models in the context of item recommendation which is a key
discipline in machine learning. We observe that quantum-inspired
recommender systems can compete with state-of-the-art algorithms for item
recommendation. Based on joint work with Aram Harrow. Relevant preprints:
arXiv:1412.7437 and arXiv:1510.02800.

*We still have some slots for mourning chats (10-12) and lunch if anyone is
interested (12-ish)*

Hope all is well,

Ben

[Aspuru-Guzik Group List] Visit of postdoc candidate Cyril Stark tomorrow