Name:

Dr. Tameem Albash

Title:

Assistant Professor

Department:

Electrical and Computer Engineering

Describe your research in about 200 words.

My present research interests are on understanding how and whether quantum advantages may manifest themselves in near-term quantum information processing hardware. While quantum algorithms are known to provide computational speedups over their classical counterparts, current devices are limited both in the size and length of computations they can perform. The challenge is now to uncover computational tasks for which these and future near-term devices could provide measurable performance advantages given these constraints. My current focus is on heuristic quantum algorithms, such as quantum annealing and variational quantum algorithms, which are amenable to implementation on such near-term quantum hardware. Of particular interest to me is the question of whether there is ultimately a tradeoff between the noise-sensitivity of an algorithm and its ability of providing a genuine quantum speedup.

What’s the most interesting thing you have learned from a student?

Quite generally, students have an uncanny ability to show you how poorly you understand a topic you thought you understood.