Building the Quantum Software Stack – and Verifying It by Prof. Ramanathan S. Thinniyam

In the second part, I will shift focus to my own research: the use of formal methods—particularly automata-theoretic techniques—in reasoning about quantum circuits. I’ll present recent work on verifying properties of quantum circuits and how ideas from classical program analysis can be extended to this new domain. Throughout, I’ll try to convey both the excitement and the difficulty of building a rigorous foundation for quantum software.

Bio: Ramanathan S. Thinniyam is an assistant professor in the Division of Computer Systems, Department of Information Technology, Uppsala University. Prior to joining Uppsala, he was a postdoc at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems, Kaiserslautern, and a visiting fellow at the Chennai Mathematical Institute. He obtained his Ph.D. from the Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai. He works on theoretical problems arising from verification in the classical settings, with a recent focus on verification of quantum circuits. He is broadly interested in topics at the intersection of logic, computation, and mathematics.