Philip Atzemoglou

Mr Philip Atzemoglou

Doctoral Student

Student, Wolfson College

Interests

The study of quantum programming languages is still at a nascent stage. I believe that, by formalising these languages to higher degrees of abstraction, we will be able to single out the structural elements that provide quantum computation with its power. This will allow us to write more expressive languages and use them to design useful quantum algorithms, instead of relying largely on guesswork, as has been the case until now. My research interests lie at the intersection between quantum computing, category theory [AC04], programming language semantics and logic [Abr93].

I have been working on a lambda calculus that bridges the programming languages approach to quantum programming [Sel04a], [Sel04b], [vTD03], [vT04], [SV04], [SV08], [SV10] with the the category theoretic approach of [AC04] and the complementary observables of [CD11], [CPP10] and [CPP08]. The higher-order language in my dissertation thus attempts this bridge by casting the diagrammatic formalism into the rich and well established tradition of type theory. The dagger lambda calculus, that's how the language is called, lends itself nicely to measurement-based quantum computation [DKP07] and is capable of encoding many well known quantum algorithms.

Biography

I have a Master of Science degree in Computer Science from Columbia University. Before that, I did my Bachelor's degree at NYU, where I majored in Mathematics and Computer Science, with an emphasis in pure mathematics and theoretical computer science. Before coming here, I also spent some time as an officer in the Greek army; an unusual experience, which did however provide me with a heightened sense of discipline in my life.