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Xanadu 2023 Residency Program

September 6, 2023

Fast-track your career in quantum with our 17-week program designed to provide graduate and undergraduate students in engineering, science, and computer science the opportunity to learn, build technical skills, conduct innovative research and contribute towards technically challenging projects.

The Xanadu Residency Program is a 17-week program designed to provide graduate and undergraduate students in engineering, science, and computer science the opportunity to learn, build technical skills, conduct innovative research and contribute towards technically challenging projects.

Read on to meet the residents from this year and learn about their work, their Toronto summer, and learn why you should apply to be a 2024 Xanadu Resident.

Meet the residents

Ludmila Augusta Soares Botelho

Ludmila is a PhD student in Information and Communication Technologies at the Institute of Theoretical and Applied Informatics, Polish Academy of Sciences (IITiS-PAN) in Poland. Her research focuses on quantum optimization algorithms and their applications.

Throughout her residency at Xanadu, Ludmila joined the Community team and worked on codebook content creation under the supervision of Alvaro Ballon. She also published an introductory demo on Grover's Algorithm.

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Residency Highlights: "Dragon boat, falling into Toronto lake while paddling a kayak, rowing a canoe in terrible weather during our camping trip in Algonquin park, basically everything involving boats! Jokes apart, I had a great time. Every week was a different adventure! And I am very pleased to share those experiences with my dear colleagues, especially the other residents. It amazes me how nice, smart, kind and unique each of those guys are."

Oriel Kiss

Oriel is a PhD student in Quantum Algorithms at the University of Geneva in Switzerland. He is studying quantum algorithms to simulate nuclear and high-energy physics between CERN and the University of Geneva.

Throughout his residency at Xanadu, Oriel joined the Algorithms team and worked on intermediate-scale quantum algorithms in practice under the supervision of Juan Miguel Arrazola.

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Residency Highlights: "Finding the best iced coffee recipe, the daily table tennis games, rock climbing for the first time, canoeing in Algonquin with the crazy wind."

Danial Motlagh

Danial is a Computer Science Undergrad at the University of Toronto in Canada, dabbling in all things quantum — from algorithms and chemistry to machine learning. He joined the Xanadu Residency program to develop new and better quantum algorithms for simulating molecules and materials.

Danial was a resident in the Algorithms team and worked on developing novel methods for ground state preparation on quantum computers under the supervision of Juan Miguel Arrazola. He also published a demo on how to build a quantum lock using the quantum phase kickback.

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Residency Highlights: "Having to walk down 24 flights of stairs after the fire alarm went off in the middle of a meeting."

Ryosuke Noro

Ryosuke is a PhD student in Engineering at Osaka University in Japan. His research is focused on the design, fabrication, and evaluation of optical devices using nitride semiconductors and ferroelectric materials.

Throughout his residency at Xanadu, Ryosuke joined the Architecture team and worked on the preparation of GKP states under the supervision of Eli Bourassa.

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Residency Highlights: "The Niagara Falls trip was one of the best experiences of my life. I watched two Blue Jays games with other residents and interns. They were both exciting!"

Borja Requena

Borja is a PhD student in Machine Learning for Physics at ICFO - The Institute of Photonic Sciences in Spain. He develops techniques to study physics at different scales, from quantum many-body physics, to animal behaviour.

Throughout his residency at Xanadu, Borja joined the Software team and worked on designing quantum gates with reinforcement learning and contributed to PennyLane under the supervision of Tom Bromley. He also published a demo on the basic principles of the compilation of quantum circuits.

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Residency Highlights: "Lighting a fire in terrible weather after canoeing against the elements while camping in Algonquin park with the residents. We enjoyed a great barbeque and s’mores by the lake under the rain :D. In general, we’ve had a lot of fun every day: sharing great moments at les quatre heures, squeezing our brains together to figure out our way around problems, playing table tennis and pool, climbing in the evenings, and going on adventures on the weekends!"

Ryohei (Rio) Weil

Rio is a MSc student in Physics at the University of British Columbia in Canada. He studies computational phases of matter, as well as the connections between measurement-based quantum computing, cohomology, and contextuality.

Throughout his residency at Xanadu, Rio joined the Architecture team and worked on fault-tolerant analysis, especially implementing and running error-correction simulations of improvements to Xanadu's photonic architecture, under the supervision of Ilan Tzitrin.

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Residency Highlights: "My favourite part of the residency was getting to know all of the other wonderful residents and members of the architecture team. Rock climbing, kayaking on Toronto island, forming an a cappella group for open mic night, camping in Algonquin park—there are too many memorable moments that we shared together to choose from!"

Frederik Wilde

Frederik is a PhD student in Physics at Freie Universität Berlin in Germany studying variational quantum algorithms and quantum system identification.

Throughout his residency at Xanadu, Frederik joined the Software team and worked on methods for computing gradients of quantum circuits and contributed to PennyLane under the supervision of Tom Bromley and Nathan Killoran.

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Residency Highlights: "Getting to know all the wonderful people at Xanadu (including the other residents), countless table tennis games, being able to learn a lot of new math and software skills, and coming to work every day with a little bit of curiosity."

Richard A. Wolf

Richard is a research fellow at the Irish Center for High-End Computing and University of Galway where he heads an R&D project on quantum natural language processing for NISQ devices. Having specialized so far in (quantum) machine learning and algorithms, he has more recently developed a keen interest in quantum architecture design and error correction, which he will be pursuing further in his future work.

Throughout his residency at Xanadu, Richard joined the Architecture team and worked on adding support for new representations of quantum states in the photonic circuit simulator Mr Mustard, under the supervision of Filippo Miatto.

Residency Highlights: "The dragon boat race!"

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