Over the past couple of years, I've been learning a little about the world of quantum machine learning (QML) and the sorts of things people are thinking about there. I recently gave an high-level talk on some of these ideas in connection to a December 2024 preprint called "Towards Structure-Preserving Quantum Encodings", coauthored with collaborators at Deloitte (Andrew Vlasic and Anh Pham) and MIT (Arthur Parzygnat). I spoke on this at the AWM Research Symposium this past May and have decided to write it up in a series of blog posts, as well.

In short, our preprint translates one aspect of an open problem in QML into the language of category theory, in hopes that by casting the problem in a more mathematically-formal light, we might be led to new tools and techniques that could help. I'll explain that in this series of articles.

Of course, the real question is: Did this help the QML problem? Right now, it's too early to know. Our preprint was written to a QML audience, and we assumed no familiarity with category theory. Still, it takes a while for ideas to spread. So, one goal for writing this series is just to get these ideas "out there" and see if they're of interest to anybody.

Another goal is just to share with everyone some topics that I personally think are interesting.

So here we go!

The next episode in the fAQ video podcast is now up! As mentioned last time, this is a new project I've embarked on with Adam Green where we chat about different ideas in quantum physics and (at some point) AI. Our primary goal is simply to help make these ideas more accessible to wide audiences — especially to folks who may've heard about certain words in, say, the popular media, but who may not have a technical background and who aren't really sure what those words mean.

We thought it'd be good to launch the podcast with some basic, fundamental ideas that can be used as a foundation for discussing real-world application in future episodes. Last time we introduced the topic of qubits, and today we're focusing on another basic topic, namely superposition.

So, what is superposition? We spend nearly an hour on this question, so I won't spoil it all for you! But there are a few remarks I can't resist sharing here.

In a bit of fun news, I've just launched a new video podcast with my coworker Adam Green. This new video series, which we're calling fAQ, consists of casual conversations between me and Adam on basic ideas in quantum physics and eventually some topics in AI. (Hence the "A" and "Q," which is also a hat tip to our employer, SandboxAQ.) The target audience is very broad and includes any curious human who wants to learn more about these ideas. Our hope is that these informal chats might help demystify some ideas in math, physics, and their applications and make the concepts more accessible to wide audiences.

Adam is a biologist by training, an excellent science communicator, and before joining Sandbox he was the Director of US Academic Content at Khan Academy. He's now the Head of Science education at Sandbox, and since neither of us are physicists, we're essentially working together to learn new things and are inviting anyone to join us!

Our plan is to spend the first few episodes discussing fundamental ideas, just to lay down some ground work, and then we'll see where things go from there. So, without any further ado, here's a short seven minute "trailer" video we made to introduce the podcast.

Today I'm excited to share a few new videos with you. But first, a little background.

As you may know, I started working at Alphabet, Inc. just after finishing graduate school in 2020. I was on a team of amazing people that formed the core of what is now SandboxAQ, a new company focusing on AI and quantum technologies, which spun out of Alphabet in March 2022. There were several news articles about this, including this one from the Wall Street Journal and this one from Forbes. More press coverage is listed on the company website here.

But what is SandboxAQ exactly?  I recently asked Sandbox founder and CEO Jack Hidary that question, and you can now check it out on our new YouTube channel. Take a look!