Bob Coecke
14 - 15 November 2023
LIGENTEC
Lausanne, Switzerland
Events
Bob Coecke
Bob Coecke, Chief Scientist, Quantinnum
ZX-calculus
About the Speaker
Prof 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 has supervised 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, Quantum Natural Language Processing, and DisCoCirc natural language meaning. He co-authored Picturing Quantum Processes, with Aleks Kissinger, a book providing a fully diagrammatic treatment of quantum theory and its applications. He co-authored Quantum in Pictures, with Stefano Gogioso, which does the same, but now accessible to people with no maths background. He co-authored some 200 research papers. He obtained approx. 35 grants, including from NFWO, EPSRC, Leverhulme, EU, ONR, AFOSR, FQXi, JTF. He is 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. He founded the diamond-open-access journal Compositionality, and Cambridge University Press' Applied Category Theory book series. He was the first person to have Quantum Foundations as part of his academic title. His work has been headlined by various media outlets, including Forbes, New Scientist, PhysicsWorld, ComputerWeekly, IFL Science.
