Monday 25 February at 9:00 a.m. Budinich Lecture Hall, Talk by Dr. Peter Wittek

[CM Section]

Dear All,

You are most cordially invited to the opening talk of the Workshop on 
Ubiquitous Quantum Physics:
The New Quantum Revolution, that will be delivered by Dr. Peter Wittek, 
who will speak about:

Quantum-enhanced Machine Learning: A Sanity Check

The event will take place in Budinich Lecture Hall on _Monday, 25/02 at 
9:00 am_.

The talk is intended for a _broad audience of theoretical physicists and 
mathematicians_.

More information about the event is available at the Workshop webpage: 
http://indico.ictp.it/event/8662.

All the best
Marcello DALMONTE
>
> ==================================================
>
> Dr. Peter Wittek / https://peterwittek.com
>
> Quantum-enhanced Machine Learning: a sanity check
>
> Machine learning is one of the fields that could benefit from near-term
> quantum computers: just the same way massively parallel digital computers
> enabled deep learning to scale up, quantum processing units (QPUs) are 
> great
> at doing certain workloads. The problem is that the emergent field of 
> quantum
> machine learning has been plagued with expectations that are 
> unrealistic on
> contemporary quantum computers and relevance to the machine learning 
> and AI
> communities has largely been overlooked. In this talk, we give a 
> survey on
> what early quantum devices can contribute to machine learning. The 
> primary
> algorithmic primitives are sampling, optimization, calculating kernel
> functions, and some variational problems efficiently which map to hybrid
> classical-quantum protocols. The main application areas in machine 
> learning
> are probabilistic graphical models, in particular Boltzmann machines 
> and deep
> variants thereof, quantum neural networks, and searches over discrete
> parameter spaces. These models have different strengths than the ones 
> trained
> on digital computers, hence quantum machine learning plays a 
> complementary
> role to classical techniques, rather than acting as a replacement. We 
> will
> also highlight possible pathways forward that would make upcoming quantum
> architectures more relevant to AI research.
>