Each year, Xanadu's Residency Program receives hundreds of applications from students across multiple disciplines, from engineering to machine learning. A handful of these students will join the Xanadu team in Toronto for the summer as Xanadu Residents, working on exciting projects with some of the biggest names in the field. Residents join our software, research, and education teams and spend their summer contributing to the future of quantum machine learning, quantum computing, quantum chemistry, software development and photonics.
Find out more about the experiences, backgrounds and interests of the eight 2023 Xanadu Residents — and how a summer stay at the home of PennyLane changed their view of working at the forefront of the quantum industry!
The Xanadu Residency Program accepts applications from enthusiastic students (including PhD students) and fresh graduates for the 2024 cohort until December 8, 2023 at 11:59 p.m. Eastern Time (EST). If this program sounds like a fit for you, apply as soon as possible and join us on our mission to build quantum computers that are useful and available to people everywhere! If you're on the fence, read on and see why your summer should be at Xanadu.
After a 17-week stay at the Xanadu offices in Toronto, 2023 Xanadu Residents have now finished up a unique summer of fun and learning, where they dove into breakthrough projects in quantum research, software, and education — and they each mastered a project in their field of specialization.
Frederik Wilde joined Xanadu's Software Team and worked with Tom Bromley and Nathan Killoran on a project where he researched methods to calculate derivatives via sparse dynamical Lie algebras — and speed up the calculations themselves. "Before starting my project, I wasn't sure if my skills would be at a high enough level," he says, "but this has been a super valuable experience and I am proud of the method we have prototyped."
Similarly to Frederik, Ludmila Botelho paused her PhD at the Polish Academy of Sciences to join Alvaro Ballon in developing the PennyLane Codebook, from research to coding. Beyond creating Codebook nodes and codercises to teach others, Ludmila says she has been learning a lot, as well — she has even gotten the chance to submit a bug fix for a PennyLane issue that cropped up in a codercise she was developing. "I feel like I've been rediscovering all the nice aspects of quantum information that I'd like to highlight to others; and unlike with scientific papers, here I can always imprint a bit of myself," she shares.
But Xanadu Residents are not only late-stage PhD students looking for a taste of industry projects. As a Mitacs student, Ryohei Weil joined Xanadu's Residency Program this year as a MSc student. In his MSc program at The University of British Columbia, Ryohei has been studying quantum information theory and measurement-based quantum computing (MBQC), which gave him the perfect skillset to contribute to a project in Xanadu's Architecture Team. While working with Ilan Tzitrin, Ryohei simulated and analyzed loss reduction strategies and their impact on the fault tolerance of Xanadu's architecture.
As a Canadian, he was excited to stay in Toronto and enjoyed cycling through the city and hanging out with other Residents — he even organized a Residents' a cappella performance at Xanadu's Open Mic Night. He found that his time as a Resident came with a good balance of direction and freedom, with the flexibility of a lively R&D environment — and most Residents agree that this was the most valuable part of their experience.
"I didn't have many expectations about working in industry," Ludmila explains, "but the healthy approach to work-life balance at Xanadu has been a relief and I could be myself, be funny and crack jokes, and this freedom made everything more interesting."
Borja Requena, who arrived in Toronto in the middle of his PhD studies at ICFO in Spain, is full of praise: "Toronto is nice and diverse, the offices are great, the team is amazing and Tom is super cool." With Tom Bromley as his supervisor, Borja spent his Residency in Xanadu's Software Team, designing quantum gates using reinforcement learning. This project was the perfect blend of his background in engineering physics and machine learning, and he spent some time developing a new pulse module to help find optimal pulses to execute certain gates in PennyLane, speeding up calculations by up to 100 times in some applications. "In academia coding is sometimes neglected, and I wanted to learn how to do good computational physics on real scientific problems — on the boundary between software and research," he shares, "Working in an environment where we develop a whole library was an awesome bonus."
The opportunities for the Residents to use their free time and get to know Toronto at its sunniest were aplenty. They got together weekly to hang out, explore the city, visit nearby national parks, camp and hike, and play a variety of sports with the growing Xanadu community, from capoeira to field hockey. On top of all that, some of this year's Residents (Ludmila, Richard, and Ryosuke) were part of Xanadu's dragon boat race team, claiming a confident victory over Google.
"Toronto is a big city — you can do anything you want to do here," says Oriel Kiss, whose Residency was a great opportunity to travel to Canada from the University of Geneva and, as an added bonus, visit family in Quebec. But his motivation wasn't primarily geographic, he quickly explains. "I really like PennyLane and the high-quality papers we've seen from the team over the years; as a PhD student, I wanted to take this chance to focus on more long-term applications and work with different people," he says. Supervised by Juan Miguel Arrazola, Oriel spent the summer looking into intermediate-scale quantum algorithms and figuring out how to make the ISQ era more viable. He was pleasantly surprised by how easy it was to talk to colleagues, even from completely different teams.
Ryohei agrees: "There's always the occasional frustrations when you're puzzled with arcane problems that don't make much scientific sense and you bang your head against the wall for a few hours. Everyone has these struggles, but there were always people to talk to here." Richard was quick to confirm the same, sharing that he sometimes worried about "[…] asking people silly questions about their fields. But I learned so much about optics and physics, even while going to soccer practice with the Hardware Team. Nobody made me feel like I was wasting their important time — everyone was excited to discuss their projects with me," he added.
Their fellow Resident Danial Motlagh had a similar experience. After a string of industry projects in the quantum field, Danial joined the Residency Program at the end of his BA in Computer Science at the University of Toronto. Supported by his supervisor Juan Miguel Arrazola, he used his background in quantum simulations to research dissipative ground state preparation, which gave him a fantastic chance to learn concepts that weren't even familiar to him at the start of his Residency. Of his plans for the future, Danial explains that he started off wanting to be a software engineer, but as the industry develops, topics in quantum computing have been getting more interesting, and working at Xanadu feels like a tempting prospect.
Richard Wolf felt that same pull toward quantum computing when he switched careers — after six years of working as a high school English teacher, he discovered computer science, finished a masters degree and found himself working on projects in quantum natural language processing. While taking a break from his position as a Research Fellow of the Irish Centre for High-End Computing, Richard joined Filippo Miatto from Xanadu's Architecture Team to provide different representations of quantum states with Mr Mustard, Xanadu's open-source Python library for the differentiable simulation and optimization of photonic circuits. "I started my quantum journey because it looked like the toughest nut to crack, but I was lucky that my first advisor maintained that there was nothing cryptic about quantum, it was all just a bunch of linear algebra and probabilities," he says, "So I wanted to get down to the low-level problems and work on immediately useful things while we wait for cool quantum computers to get here."
And to help us get them will be Ryosuke Noro, whose hard work and persistence really paid off this year. After applying to the Residency Program twice in the past, he feels that the third time was the charm — and he got to work on exactly what he wanted to: the architecture of photonic devices. "Xanadu is the biggest photonics quantum computing company in the world, and I always try to use photonics for everything I do," he jokes, "I'm really interested in quantum things and I'm also interested in making things; if you combine those two, you get a photonic quantum computer!"
Supervised by Eli Bourassa from Xanadu's Architecture Team, Ryosuke worked on not one but two projects, focused on building efficient GKP qubit preparation circuits. Although he claims that the highlight of the Residency Program was the opportunity to discuss with researchers from all kinds of different teams and the diverse food Toronto has to offer, there may be another. After he finishes his PhD studies at the Osaka University next year, Ryosuke plans to continue working on cool new things.
As Residents will be sorting through the fun and excitement of their stay at Xanadu, most will also be returning to their studies, but the projects they've contributed to and the people they've met will be difficult to top, and their future in quantum computing will be right around the corner. While Frederik's team will be working to implement his project into PennyLane, he will be finishing his final year of PhD at the Free University of Berlin and keeping an eye out for ways to contribute to the quantum industry. "It's been really cool to get to know PennyLane and Xanadu internally, and I will definitely stay in touch with the other Residents — we all enjoyed getting to know one another," he confirms.
To join the 2024 Xanadu Residency Program, apply now — the application period will close on December 8, 2023 at 11:59 p.m. Eastern Time (EST).
To learn more about the projects of 2023 Xanadu Residents or get in touch with them, read Xanadu's 2023 Residency Program blog post
About the author
Ivana Kurečić
🐢 Focused on the adoption and implementation of innovative technologies