Postdocs wanted!
David Soloveichik, my friend and colleague in UT Austin’s Electrical and Computer Engineering department, and I are looking to hire a joint postdoc in “Unconventional Computing,” broadly defined. Areas of interest include but are not limited to:
(1) quantum computation,
(2) thermodynamics of computation and reversible computation,
(3) analog computation, and
(4) chemical computation.
The ideal candidate would have broad multi-disciplinary interests in addition to prior experience and publications in at least one of these areas. The researcher will work closely with David and myself but is expected to be highly self-motivated. To apply, please send an email to david.soloveichik@utexas.edu and aaronson@cs.utexas.edu with the subject line “quantum postdoc application.” Please include a CV and links to three representative publications. Let’s set a deadline of January 20th. We’ll be back in touch if we need recommendation letters.
My wife Dana Moshkovitz Aaronson and my friend and colleague David Zuckerman are also looking for a joint postdoc at UT Austin, to work on pseudorandomness and related topics. They’re asking for applications by January 16th. Click here for more information.
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Comment #1 December 23rd, 2023 at 11:14 am
Are the prerequisite requirements mandatory for the job? I don’t have formal education in the field of quantum physics but I think I would be a great fit for this job. I have multiple programs I have written. I have programmed in the C++ and also in visual basic. I know about quantum science too, I’ve read many books about quantum physics, including books by brian greene and michio kaku. I’m sure I can be a great insight, perhaps not with equations but definitely coming up with scientific ideas. Please keep this in mind when I submit my CV.
Comment #2 December 23rd, 2023 at 12:45 pm
BrassTax #1 is an obvious troll; letting through solely because it might amuse someone.
Comment #3 December 23rd, 2023 at 4:09 pm
Scott #2:
Honest, Scott, do you think ChatGPT-4 (perhaps the paid version) had no role to play in generating it?
Best,
–Ajit
PS: On second thoughts, not quite. Visual Basic wasn’t generated in the .title() case. … Reminds me of a “scam” of sorts, from India, where they actually employed people, but the interface to their USA customers [who else?] pretended to be an AI of sorts…
Comment #4 December 23rd, 2023 at 5:55 pm
BrassTax seems more qualified for a position not of a postdoc but of an academic administrator (e.g. Dean of Quantum Science).
Comment #5 December 23rd, 2023 at 8:51 pm
Hi Scott,
Purely out of curiosity, what’s the compensation like? How do these things get decided?
Best of luck!
Comment #6 December 24th, 2023 at 8:24 am
doogrammargood #5: It depends on availability of grant funds and many other factors, but around $60-65k/year (plus health insurance, travel costs, etc etc) would probably be typical for postdocs in theoretical computer science.
Comment #7 December 25th, 2023 at 8:20 am
This comment is only roughly inspired by the post above, but I figured that I’m not interrupting an ongoing conversation, and this comment section’s tolerance for giving advice to internet strangers is exceptional.
I’m a recent PhD in a cognitive science and have some ideas and problems in CS theory that I think could be important for my subfield (incidentally, the path to these ideas was once driven by a colloquium talk I saw Dana give on space-bounded learning, although it has since moved in different directions.) Alas, I am no CS theorist, and there’s only so far I can take this work by myself.
I’m wondering if you have any advice for making interdisciplinary contacts in CS. I’m not currently affiliated with a school, which shrinks my network and increases my crankery score, and most of my CS friends are applied (adjacent to my field.) One interdisciplinary postdoc has already not panned out (and the one you posted here is sadly unrelated.) Are there any tricks to finding people who are open to cold-emails from potential collaborators without prior CS work?
Comment #8 December 25th, 2023 at 9:51 am
Ryan #7: Cold-email and see who responds! But — this part is absolutely crucial — show familiarity with their work and their favorite open problems and so on. “Nerd-snipe” them — pose a specific interesting question — rather than just immediately (and vaguely) asking for a collaboration. Keep it short, and easy to reply to. Don’t include lots of confusing information or terms or assumptions that only make sense in your world, not theirs. Good luck!
Comment #9 December 31st, 2023 at 1:24 pm
I hope you identify a good candidate, some of this interdisciplinary subject matter seems incredibly interesting and so potentially fruitful.
Comment #10 December 31st, 2023 at 6:45 pm
Alright, gentlemen (and any ladies too!):
Happy new year to you all!
Best,
–Ajit
Comment #11 January 7th, 2024 at 3:15 pm
The possible 16 possible states of 4 qibts are
0-0-0-0,
0-0-0-1,
0-0-1-0,
…
1-1-1-1
Is there a way to tell (by some measurement) whether 4 qbits are in a “full” equal superposition of all the 16 possible states? (as opposed to a superposition of any subset of the 16 possible states)
Comment #12 January 7th, 2024 at 7:03 pm
Forgot to mention that the same 4 (or N) qbits can be generated as many times as one needs, so is there a way to figure whether the state is the ‘full’ one (superposition of all possible permutations) without having to sample an exponential number of (re)generated qbits?
(my guess would be yes, because of quantum supremacy)
Comment #13 January 8th, 2024 at 3:47 pm
Any thoughts on the ongoing plagiarism wars?
Do a significant number of MIT phds copy-paste from Wikipedia in their dissertation?
Comment #14 January 11th, 2024 at 5:55 am
entertainment #13: Most of my experience is in quantum information and theoretical computer science, where in 25 years I’ve never become aware of a single plagiarism issue in any thesis or published paper—not one. Which isn’t to say it never happens. But I don’t think people making original research discoveries normally even feel the temptation to steal others’ words to describe their discoveries.
One of the funniest comments that I read went like this: “Claudine Gay’s long record of plagiarism indeed means that she probably isn’t qualified to be the president of Harvard. Bill Ackman’s wife’s plagiarism means that she probably isn’t qualified to be the president of Harvard either.”
Comment #15 January 11th, 2024 at 7:51 am
The plagiarism charge of Claudine Gay is perplexing. The fact that she used other authors’ words instead of wasting her time trying to come up with her own new words which basically say the same thing shows that she is efficient. Efficiency is a great quality to have if you are president of any organization.
Anyway plagiarism depends on the context. When one is a student who is being taught to write well and he takes other people’s work and passes it along as his own, this is cheating and grounds for expulsion. But when one is president or a professor at a major research institution, it is already established that they can write well so who cares if they lifted other people’s words as long as the source is in the bibliography.
Right?
Comment #16 January 11th, 2024 at 9:02 pm
Scott #14
Obviously both instances of plagiarism are pretty bad, and the oxman stuff is less relevant since she’s no longer even in academia. The fun part here is Bill Ackman’s denials and threats combined with the echo chamber telling him how great he is.
He actually said it’s fine to copy-paste from wikipedia because the rules didn’t explicitly ban it, and seemed to think he would be able to determine that everyone at MIT does the same thing.
I’m not surprised there’s no plagiarism in quantum computing, though the analogous thing here is not stealing others original research but stealing their exposition of routine topics.
Comment #17 January 12th, 2024 at 5:56 am
fred #12
(not that anyone on a blog about quantum computing seems to give a crap about my question, which shows it must be really dumb, lol)
Since the way to prepare the equi-state (whatever it’s called) is to start with all qbits at 0-0-…-0 and apply successively a bunch of Hadamard gates, I guess the answer I’ve been looking for is to apply Hadamard to the system in a similar way but in reverse way and then measure, then repeat a few times. If the mystery system isn’t in the equi-state to start with, eventually we’d measure something different from 0-0..-0 with a high probability.
Comment #18 January 12th, 2024 at 10:01 pm
https://www.thefp.com/p/resigned-mit-october-7-antisemitism
The state of our top universities are depressing. I think it is long due to deal with these so called social justice warriors and stop tolerating their intolerance.
Many of us had good intentions when we promoted for more diversity, but these SJWs lack basic empathy and decency. It is time to create a coalition for restoring universities and talking it back from these activists.
Comment #19 January 14th, 2024 at 4:16 pm
Like many others I find the woke culture a problem. It seems to me to be driven by self-serving individuals, a bunch of narcissists, and idiots. A notion that was supposed to make you think about your own behaviour and improve yourself became a tool to police other people behaviour or worst their thoughts.
However, I am not sure this is the biggest problem in academia. I am more bothered by:
1. Cost of academic studies. This reduces the pool from which universities (and later on the work market) take people. So we are no longer left with the best people doing things. It is also appalling to me that education is no longer a way to break social barriers.
2. Academic integrity seems to seriously deteriorates. We see plagiarism and cheating all over and institutes and the community seem to mostly ignore it. We see crazy levels of hype and again very few address it.
But, maybe the worst is that no one seems to address 1 and very few address 2 (mostly towards individuals rather than institutes). Is it just me that worry about these things? If not, why so few talk about it?
Comment #20 January 15th, 2024 at 11:06 am
@fred #17
Sure, you can determine if your state is in the ‘equi-state’ by a single measurement repeated many times. But there are other superpositions of all of the basis states using other coefficients of the basis states. If the superposition is different from the ‘equi-state’ your procedure might not work.
I would guess that it’s not possible to do this with a single measurement, but I really don’t know. Maybe some experts can give their opinions?
Comment #21 January 16th, 2024 at 5:56 am
I forgot to add in #19 that another huge issue in my opinion is the erosion of the tenure system. More and more academics, who are teaching in universities, do not have tenure (for instance here in the UK nobody has it anymore). This leads to reduction in academic freedom, pressure to achieve quickly which hurts long term projects, and weakening the position of academics with respect to administrators. Again no one seems to talk about it (actually worse, some people seems to think that tenure is a problem in academia).
Comment #22 January 16th, 2024 at 10:30 am
#doogrammargood
Thanks, what I tried to mean “precisely” (but I’m not sure it’s possible) is to detect whether the state is such that every basis state has the same 1/2^n probability to be measured, and that could correspond to many different superposition of the basis states (in terms of phases, etc) and it may not be the case that Haramard of all those would always transform into the [00…0] state?
I’ve been re-reading “Quantum Computing for Computer Scientists” by Yanofsky and it’s really pretty good (it’s very practical, with tons of exercises and their answers, and of the right length).
To me, the difficulties of trying to reason with qubits:
1) it’s just not enough to think in terms of obvious superposition, like (|0> + |1>)/sqrt(2), you could just as well choose (|0> – |1>)/sqrt(2), and the reason to pick one over the other it’s obvious at all until you work out all the details of the entire system (and what it’s trying to achieve).
2) It’s not even clear to me what we mean by applying Hadamard to be bunch of qubits since sometimes you can initialize all the input qubits at zero, and then apply Hadamard to each of them (as a 1 to 1 gate), or you could apply an N to N Hadamard gate.
3) talking about quantum gates, when the gate is N to N, represented by a non-sparse unitary matrix, isn’t it in general the case that you will need an exponential (in N) number of “gadgets” to implement that gate?
I guess it comes from the fact that if you really take full use of the power of a QC to work on a superposition of N qubits, meaning a complex mix of 2^N basis states), there’s really no free lunch once you hope to manipulate that state, in general you need an exponential number of gates, which defeats the advantage compared to classical.
4) I don’t think there’s a generic procedure to initialize a bunch of qubits.
Say I have 3 qubits representing state = |010> + |101> (they’re entangled), and I have another set of 3 qubits in the state = |010> + |001>
I don’t think there’s an obvious way to “join” them into 3 new qubits to get the state |010> + |101> + |001>… (or the more likely result where the basis that appears twice would end up with a bigger “weight” : 2x|010> + |101> + |001> )
Comment #23 January 17th, 2024 at 3:10 pm
I haven’t heard of chemical computation, but chemistry seems like a better platform than biology because cells have alot of extra machinery.
Embedding a problem such that it can be solved using chemistry/biology seems pretty difficult.
Maybe we could use microscopic non-repeating tilings as a source of structured randomness.
If each region is locally unique and can influence the local chemistry/biology then we’d have some randomized structure to be used for embedding.
I’m guessing that this isn’t at all the kind of thing that chemical computation is trying to do.
I see references to BZ reactions, and a brain-like ability to move data in all directions, but that’s not very clear.
I imagine that it’s related to machine learning, and trying to go beyond the existing hardware like GPUS, NPUs and TPUs.
But then how do you copy a model that’s embedded in chemical/biological structures?
With silicon-based hardware we can easily replicate the model to be used at large scale.
We don’t have to train each instance of the model separately, that would be incredibly expensive.
Not sure i’m sold on the idea.
Comment #24 January 19th, 2024 at 5:03 pm
“But then how do you copy a model that’s embedded in chemical/biological structures?
With silicon-based hardware we can easily replicate the model to be used at large scale.”
probably with the same type of techniques used to build silicon-based hardware in the first place.
A microprocessor with a 130 billion transistors is also a chemical structure after all.
Comment #25 January 28th, 2024 at 4:12 pm
Stumbled across this article the other day. It discusses AI safety, computability, and feminism—so I thought you’d find it really interesting. I think she has something genuinely new to say about the intersection of AI safety and feminism. I’m curious if you have any takes on it.
https://www.spikeartmagazine.com/articles/essay-mommy-issues-liara-roux-2023
Comment #26 January 31st, 2024 at 3:41 pm
So, any thoughts on that article?
Comment #27 February 2nd, 2024 at 10:48 am
Scott, did you read it?
Comment #28 February 2nd, 2024 at 1:56 pm
David H: From the first paragraph, it looks like something I should not read for the sake of my blood pressure.
And the fact that you would post multiple followups badgering me to read a specific thing, when it was completely off-topic and also there were zero indications that I was interested, marks you out as a bad-faith troll, and as banned from this blog.