Best Paper Award in Quantum Algorithms and IEEE Quantum Week

Our team had an amazing time at IEEE Quantum Computing and Engineering 2024 (aka IEEE Quantum Week) in Montreal, where we were honored to receive the Best Paper in Quantum Applications Award for the paper "MLQAOA: Graph Learning Accelerated Hybrid Quantum-Classical Multilevel QAOA"! The conference was packed with excellent talks, workshops, tutorials and panels. 

It was also wonderful to catch up with our lab’s alumni, the Algorithms and Computational Science Lab legends Ankit Kulshrestha Joey Xiaoyuan Liu Ruslan Shaydulin, and see their success in the field. Graduate students Bao Bach and Cameron Ibrahim gave excellent talks on their papers. Big thanks to everyone who made this event such a success. This year there were over 1,550 participants from universities, national labs, and industry. Looking forward to even better event next year in Albuquerque, NM! 

#IEEEQuantum #QCE24 #QuantumComputing #QuantumWeek #IEEE #QuantumWeek2024

Graduate Student Achievement Award

Congratulations to my former PhD student Xiaoyuan Joey Liu for winning Frank A. Pehrson Graduate Student Achievement Award! Her thesis is titled "Combinatorial Optimization Algorithms on Quantum and Quantum Inspired Devices". Xiaoyuan is now a research scientist at Fujitsu working in the area of quantum computing. This award is given to a computer science graduate student in recognition of outstanding performance, and potential for future significant contribution to the field of computer science.

New NSF grant to develop a simulator for quantum computing

NSF awarded grant to develop large-scale QAOA simulator! This is a collaborative project with the Yuri Alexeev@University of Chicago.

NSF grant to tackle COVID-19

Our team received NSF grant to tackle COVID-19 using our AI hypothesis generation system AGATHA
Clemson news coverage: Artificial intelligence could aid in fight against COVID-19

Ilya Safro of @socclemson said that his team will soon roll out a new artificial intelligence system aimed at helping researchers explore the scientific literature as they strive for new discoveries to combat the novel coronavirus.https://t.co/TwQyZqEUra pic.twitter.com/fh3K8iAoWO

— Clemson Engineering, Computing & Applied Sciences (@ClemsonCECAS) April 21, 2020

From SoC@Clemson

Congrats to Dr. Ilya Safro on receiving funding from @DARPA to work on hybrid quantum-classical algorithms for combinatorial optimization problems, a 4 year collaborative research with @argonne. He is looking for Ph.D. students to join the Algorithms & Computational Science lab. pic.twitter.com/YfIYVc7HzO

— School of Computing (@socclemson) April 3, 2020

 

Congratulations to PhD student Ruslan Shaydulin

Congratulations to PhD student Ruslan Shaydulin, advised by Dr. Ilya Safro, for receiving 2020 Maria Goeppert Mayer fellowship for postdoctoral studies at Argonne National Lab. Ruslan will start in Fall 2020. He was selected among many candidates from top schools and different disciplines.

Congratulations to PhD student Justin Sybrandt for being selected in top 12 among more than 3000 summer interns based on his achievements. Over the summer, Justin was an intern at Facebook working on Instagram.

Multistart Methods for Quantum Approximate Optimization

Best student paper award at IEEE HPEC2019 goes to our lab! Congratulations to the leading student Ruslan Shaydulin!

Ruslan Shaydulin, Ilya Safro, Jeffrey Larson "Multistart Methods for Quantum Approximate Optimization", accepted at IEEE High Performance Extreme Computing Conference (HPEC) 2019, preprint at https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.08768

Hybrid quantum-classical algorithms such as the quantum approximate optimization algorithm (QAOA) are considered one of the most promising approaches for leveraging near-term quantum computers for practical applications. Such algorithms are often implemented in a variational form, combining classical optimization methods with a quantum machine to find parameters to maximize performance. The quality of the QAOA solution depends heavily on quality of the parameters produced by the classical optimizer. Moreover, multiple local optima in the space of parameters make it harder for the classical optimizer. In this paper we study the use of a multistart optimization approach within a QAOA framework to improve the performance of quantum machines on important graph clustering problems. We also demonstrate that reusing the optimal parameters from similar problems can improve the performance of classical optimization methods, expanding on similar results for MAXCUT.

Travel awards

Congratulations to Justin Sybrandt and Ruslan Shaydulin for receiving travel awards to present their papers at IEEE Big Data 2018 and APS 2018!