MQV Colloquium: Elham Kashefi

"Distributed Quantum Computing as a Service"

Elham Kashefi – University of Edinburgh

Abstract

The exploitation of certification tools by end users represents a fundamental aspect of the development of quantum technologies as the hardware scales up beyond the regime of classical simulatability. Certifying quantum networks becomes even more crucial when the privacy of their users is exposed to malicious quantum nodes or servers as in the case of multi-client distributed blind quantum computing, where several clients delegate a joint private computation to remote quantum servers, such as federated quantum machine learning. In such protocols, security must be provided not only by keeping data hidden but also by verifying that the server is correctly performing the requested computation while minimizing the hardware assumptions on the employed devices. In this talk we review recent progress to address the three key challenges of scalability, privacy, and integrity to pave the way for Distributed Quantum Computing as a service for all.

Short bio

Kashefi has pioneered transdisciplinary research on the structure, behaviour, and interactions of quantum technology, from formal and foundational aspects all the way to actual industrial use-case delivery. Kashefi's research team innovates across a broad range of platforms (photonic, superconducting, ion trap) with an integrated software research programme (simulation, modelling and verification) delivering impact in quantum computing (machine learning, cryptanalysis) and quantum networks (quantum cryptography, quantum cloud computing) in a certifiable way (provable security, practical benchmarking, verification of computation). She is a recipient of an EPSRC Early Career and back-to-back Established Career Fellowship awards, a recipient of the Les Margaret Intrapraneur prize (France, 2021), and an elected member of the Young Academy of Scotland (Royal Society of Edinburgh). She has been awarded several UK, EU, and US grants for research in quantum computing, software, communication, and applications. As a global community leader, Kashefi champions the quantum application ecosystem: she is NQCC Chief scientist; co-author of the EU Quantum Software Manifesto; Leadership team of the UK QCI3 hub. She has served on programme and steering committees of flagship conferences of the field (e.g. QCrypt, TQC, QIP, QCTiP), published 150+ articles across high impact venues and delivered 300+ invited talks in major workshops, conferences, symposiums, and industry events.