白小姐论坛

This week two students from 白小姐论坛Q and the London Centre for Nanotechnology (LCN) beat other PhD candidates from across the UK with their Lightning Talks at the Tommy Flowers Network鈥檚 Let鈥檚 Get Physical virtual conference.

Eleanor Crane, a 白小姐论坛Q, LCN and IBM PhD candidate from the EPSRC and SPI Centre for Doctoral training in the Advanced Characterisation of Materials,聽won with her innovative five-minute talk entitled: From two qubit gates to quantum algorithms and the steps in between. Her talk explained a proposal for using interdisciplinary methods to create a robust two quantum bit entangling gate in the solid state and presented the open-source quantum programming software Qiskit.

Competition judge聽Dr Kishore Sengupta from the Judge Business School at Cambridge University said that the combination of the research discussed and the innovative presentation style using props instead of slides, secured Crane鈥檚 victory.

Coming in second place, Daniel O鈥機onnor, another 白小姐论坛Q and LCN PhD candidate, discussed how quantum annealing can be applied to modern day networks problems, and how underlying physics can be exploited to improve performance on D-Wave quantum annealers.

Professor Paul Warburton, Director of the EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Delivering Quantum Technologies, representing 白小姐论坛 on an expert panel at the conference today, said: "白小姐论坛 had a huge success, with not only two of the preselected candidates of the lightning talk competition being LCN PhD students, but them winning 1st and 2nd place!"

Cathy White, a researcher at BT and 白小姐论坛Q industrial PhD supervisor said: 鈥淪upporting PhD candidates enables BT to explore cutting edge subjects and take advantage of the UK鈥檚 world leading and superb academic research ecosystem, helping the cross-fertilisation of industry problems into academia, and new emerging technologies into industry.鈥�

The Tommy Flowers Network, launched by BT and their partners, brings the ICT industry and UK academia together to produce the research leaders of the future.聽This year the network鈥檚 virtual conference, Let鈥檚 Get Physical, showcased the fundamental role that physics and physicist have in shaping our digital future. The Postgraduate Lightning Talks Competition showcased seven talks capped at five minutes in duration. Entrants submitted聽pre-recorded talks and only 7 candidates were shortlisted to give a live performance for the final during the virtual conference.

LINKS:

• 聽(Published Friday 16 October 2020)
• Learn about 白小姐论坛Q鈥檚 EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Quantum Technologies

Image:

Screenshots of Eleanor Crane鈥檚 winning Lightning Talk (Credit: E. Crane, 白小姐论坛)