Quantum BC Seminar Series - Quantum BC Students
2025-08-12 14:00 - 15:00 (America/Vancouver)
Quantum BC Seminar Series Tuesday, August 12, 2025 at 2pm BC Time with UBC Students Jonas Jäger and Elham Torabian
Join on Zoom: https://ubc.zoom.us/j/69443327772?pwd=[REDACTED]
Meeting ID: 694 4332 7772 Passcode: [REDACTED]

Join in person at UBC: MacLeod 3038
Join in person at SFU Burnaby: SCP 8445.2

Seminar Title: Analytic reconstructions to power gradient-free optimization applied to quantum chemistry and quantum machine learning
Seminar Abstract:
While gradient-based optimization is highly successful in deep learning, it faces limitations in quantum computing, largely because backpropagation is not available. We switch gears to gradient-free optimization powered by analytic reconstructions that capture more information than gradients from the same quantum circuit evaluations. We showcase the power of this paradigm through its applications in quantum chemistry and quantum machine learning. For quantum chemistry, we outperform state-of-the-art optimizers by reaching chemical accuracy faster for the electronic structure problem of molecules. For quantum machine learning, we enable efficient quantum feature map learning with reduced quantum resource overhead, achieving accurate solutions to high-dimensional classification tasks on real IBM quantum hardware.

Short biographies:
Jonas Jäger is a PhD student at UBC in Computer Science and Applied Mathematics and a quantum computing scholar in the NSERC quantum computing CREATE program. His research focuses on the intersection of quantum computing, machine learning and optimization with applications in chemistry.

Elham Torabian is a PhD candidate in UBC chemistry and a quantum computing scholar in the NSERC quantum computing CREATE program. She’s a quantum computing and quantum machine learning researcher eager to develop quantum computing and machine learning algorithms to explore new possibilities and accelerate solving complex physics/chemistry problems.
