Bob Coecke
Quantinuum
&
Distinguished Visiting Research Chair
Perimeter Institute
Bob Coecke is Chief Scientist at Quantinuum, head Quantinuum's Oxford-based Quantum NLP & Compositional Intelligence sub-team, Distinguished Visiting Research Chair at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, Emeritus Fellow at Wolfson College Oxford, and Visiting Fellow at the Computer Science Department and the Mathematical Institute of Oxford University. Previously he was Professor of Quantum Foundations, Logics and Structures at the Department of Computer Science at Oxford University, where he was 20 years, and co-founded and led a multi-disciplinary Quantum Group that grew to 50 members and he supervised close to 70 PhD students. He is still supervising, at Oxford and elsewhere, and also still teaching at Oxford's Mathematical Institute. He pioneered Categorical Quantum Mechanics (now in AMS's MSC2020 classification), ZX-calculus, DisCoCat natural language meaning, mathematical foundations for resource theories, Quantum Natural Language Processing, and DisCoCirc natural language meaning. I co-authored Picturing Quantum Processes, with Aleks Kissinger, a book providing a fully diagrammatic treatment of quantum theory and its applications. I co-authored Quantum in Pictures, with Stefano Gogioso, which does the same, but now accessible to people with no maths background. I co-authored some 200 research papers. I obtained approx. 35 grants, including from NFWO, EPSRC, Leverhulme, EU, ONR, AFOSR, FQXi, JTF. I still hold grants with the latter two. I am a founding father of the QPL (Quantum Physics and Logic) and ACT (Applied Category Theory) communities, a steering board member of QPL, ACT and QISS (Quantum Information Structure of Spacetime), and in the Scientific Advisory Council of FQxI. I founded the diamond-open-access journal Compositionality, and Cambridge University Press' Applied Category Theory book series. I was the first person to have Quantum Foundations as part of his academic title. My work has been headlined by various media outlets, including Forbes, New Scientist, PhysicsWorld, ComputerWeekly, IFL Science.
Title/Abstract:
From quantum picturalism to quantum NLP and quantum AI
In 2020 our Oxford-based Quantinuum team performed Quantum Natural Language Processing (QNLP) on IBM quantum hardware [1, 2]. Key to having been able to achieve what is conceived as a heavily data-driven task, is the observation that quantum theory and natural language are governed by much of the same compositional structure -- a.k.a. tensor structure. Hence our language model is in a sense quantum-native, and we provide an analogy with simulation of quantum systems in terms of algorithmic speed-up [forthcoming]. Meanwhile we have made all our software available open-source, and with support [github.com/CQCL/lambeq]. The compositional match between natural language and quantum extends to other domains than language, and argue that a new generation of AI can emerge when fully pushing this analogy, while exploiting the completeness of categorical quantum mechanics / ZX-calculus [3, 4, 5] for novel reasoning purposes that go hand-in-hand with modern machine learning.
[1] B. Coecke, G. De Felice, K. Meichanetzidis and A. Toumi (2020) Foundations for Near-Term Quantum Natural Language Processing. https://arxiv.org/abs/2012.03755
[2] R. Lorenz, A. Pearson, K. Meichanetzidis, D. Kartsaklis and B. Coecke (2020) QNLP in Practice: Running Compositional Models of Meaning on a Quantum Computer. https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.12846
[3] B. Coecke and A. Kissinger (2017) Picturing Quantum Processes. A first course on quantum theory and diagrammatic reasoning. Cambridge University Press.
[4] B. Coecke, D. Horsman, A. Kissinger and Q. Wang (2021) Kindergarten quantum mechanics graduates (...or how I learned to stop gluing LEGO together and love the ZX-calculus). https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.10984
[5] B. Coecke and S. Gogioso (2022) Quantum in Pictures. Quantinuum, 2023.