The Oxford Advanced Seminar on Informatic Structures

Introduction to OASIS

Michaelmas 2004

Hilary 2005

Trinity 2005

Michaelmas 2005

Hilary 2006

Trinity 2006

Michaelmas 2006

Hilary 2007

Trinity 2007

Michaelmas 2007

Hilary 2008

Trinity 2008

Trinity 2007

QUANTUM OR NOT QUANTUM?

Talks are Friday afternoons at 2:00pm in the NEW Lecture Theatre of the Computing Laboratory. The Computing Laboratory is located at the corner of Parks road and Keble road. Abstracts can be found at the bottom of this page. Everyone is welcome!

• Tuesday 8 May (week 3; 4:30 PM) [Keith van Rijsbergen] (University of Glasgow) Information Retrieval in a Geometric Context

• Friday 1 June (week 6; 2:00 PM) [Jacob Biamonte] (D-Wave and Harvard) Some models of quantum computation

• Friday 8 June (week 7; 3:15 PM) [Dusko Pavlovic] (Kestrel and Oxford) Finding network modules by ranking pathways

• Monday 9 July (2 PM) [Alex Wilce] (Susquehana, US) Broadcasting and Teleportation in General Probabilistic Theories

Keith van Rijsbergen's abstract: I shall introduce the way geometry has played a critical role in Information Retrieval. This will lead me to a discussion on how the Hilbert space formalism used in Quantum Theory may serve as 'language' for developing new models for Information Retrieval.

Jake Biamonte's abstract: There has been increasing recent interest in the use of physics inspired models of quantum computation. This is due, in part, to their potential ease of physical realization which is based on the promise of natural fault tolerance. In this talk I will review some of these models, focusing on the adiabatic model of quantum computation as well as the measurement based models. Parts of this talk represent joint work with Peter J. Love.

Dusko Pavlovic's abstract: Computer networks, social networks, food webs, protein interactions, genetic regulatory networks, and many other distributed computational systems share not just the underlying structures, but also the modes of information processing. Moreover, they share the problems of scope and scaling. In order to understand, control, and sometimes secure the correct functioning of complex networks, we need to decompose them into smaller, more manageable parts. One aspect of this task is addressed in the large body of work on graph partition, clustering and classification, which seeks to identify those network nodes which play similar roles. A more recent effort has been directed towards developing the methods to recognize and structure the functional network subunits, spanned by the nodes which act together. Such functional subunits are often called modules. In this talk, i shall briefly survey the problem of network modularity, and argue that it requires an analysis of network information flows, and not just of the link structure. As a step in this direction, I shall present a method for extracting modules from a network, and for recognizing their own network structure, based on the idea of ranking the pathways that carry the information flows.

In this talk, i shall briefly survey the problem of network modularity, and argue that it requires an analysis of network information flows, and not just of the link structure. As a step in this direction, I shall present a method for extracting modules from a network, and for recognizing their own network structure, based on the idea of ranking the pathways that carry the information flows.

Alex Wilce's abstract: Quantum mechanics is a non-classical probability calculus, but hardly the most general one imaginable: any compact convex set can serve as the ``state space" for a probabilistic model. Using essentially any reasonable notion of a tensor product for such abstract state spaces, many familiar properties of quantum entanglement turn out to be generically non-classical, rather than specifically quantum. In this talk I'll outline proofs of quite generic no-cloning and no-broadcasting theorems -- the latter, substantially simpler than earlier proofs of the quantum-mechanical result. I'll also discuss conditions under which a general probabilistic theory supports a teleportation protocol. Here, the story is rather different, as the existence of such a protocol imposes sharp constraints on both the state spaces and the tensor products involved. (see quant-ph/0611295.)