Monday, December 21, 2020

Gushu Li from UCSB Gave Talk on Testing and Debugging Quantum Programs in Group Meeting

 On Dec 17, 2020, Gushu Li gave an invited talk in our ASE group meeting on his paper "Projection-based Runtime Assertions for Testing and Debugging Quantum Programs". The paper was accepted by OOPSLA 2020 and won the ACM SIGPLAN Distinguished Paper Award. Our group members had a fruitful discussion and brainstormed several future directions.

The paper presents Proq, a runtime assertion scheme for testing and debugging quantum programs on a quantum computer. At a high level, Proq represents the assertion predicate by projections (or equivalently, closed subspaces of the state space), following Birkhoff-von Neumann quantum logic. Theoretically, the assertion can be directly checked upon a small number of projective measurements rather than a large number of repeated executions. Practically, Proq considers hardware constraints and introduces several techniques to transform the assertions, making them directly executable on the measurement-restricted quantum computers.

Gushu Li is a fourth-year Ph.D. student at ECE Department, University of California, Santa Barbara, advised by Prof. Yuan Xie and Prof. Yufei Ding. His research interests include but are not limited to Computer Architecture, Compiler, Programming Language for Quantum Computing.