Quantum Conversations By the Bay I: Oxford and U Chicago

ai.bythebay.io Nov 2025, Oakland, full-stack AI conference This is the inaugural Quantum Conversations, By the Bay, the global online community of quantum researchers run by Dr. Alexy Khrabrov in partnership with the Academic Programs at IBM, under the leadership of Sebastian Hassinger. Submit a talk proposal or a lightning/unconference talk following each structured agenda at https://quantum.sv! Talk 1: Quantum circuits: from structure to software Quantum circuits are a de facto assembly language for quantum software. Programs are described as list of primitive operations, or gates, which are run in sequence on a quantum computer to perform a computation. Just like with classical software, there is more that one way to write a program to do the same job, and so it’s important to find programs that do that job as quickly and cheaply as possible. Looking at quantum circuits just as lists of gates doesn’t tell us a whole lot about what computation is being performed, or how it might be optimised. However, if we “break open” quantum gates, we see a rich graphical/algebraic structure inside called the ZX-calculus. This can be used not only for making quantum circuits more efficient, but also for performing other critical tasks like bug-checking. In this talk, I will give a brief overview of these techniques, and how they can be used with an open source software library called PyZX. Aleks Kissinger has been an Associate Professor of Quantum Computing in Oxford’s Computer Science Department since Autumn 2019. Before that, he was an Assistant Professor of Quantum Structures…