First quantum paper wins ACM award at top programming venue

Two QSI researchers have won an ACM SIGPLAN Distinguished Paper Award in quantum technology at OOPSLA 2020, a top international programming language conference; a world-first in their field.

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Image: WallpaperCave

Dr Nengkun Yu and Distinguished Professor Mingsheng Ying are the recipients of the first 'OOPSLA 2020 Distinguished Paper Award' in the field of quantum computing for their work on Proq, a runtime assertion scheme to test and debug quantum programs.

“A major challenge in quantum program development is to develop accurate quantum programs, since programmers living in the classical [non-quantum] world can easily make mistakes in the counter-intuitive quantum programming world,” said Dr Yu of the UTS Centre for Quantum Software and Information (QSI).

This is because quantum computer information is unstable and unpredictable in an environment governed by quantum mechanics, so professional programmers need to work with speed and accuracy to mitigate errors.

Programmers will be able to use the debugging scheme to test a quantum program and find the locations of potential bugs or errors. Then specific errors can be located quickly, rather than searching the entire program.

“Our method can help locate bugs or statistically assure that the semantic function of the tested program is close to what we expect, for both exact and approximate quantum programs.” he said.  

The winning paper, Projection-based Runtime Assertions for Testing and Debugging Quantum Programs, is a joint work by researchers from the University of Technology Sydney, UC Santa Barbara and the Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy.

Held this month, OOPSLA (Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications) is a top-tier ACM SIGPLAN programming language conference focusing on object-oriented programming systems, languages, and applications in programming languages and software engineering. Distinguished Paper Awards are presented to authors whose work represents groundbreaking research in their respective areas.

READ MORE: 
Projection-based Runtime Assertions for Testing and Debugging Quantum Programs 
Authors: Gushu Li, Li Zhou, Nengkun Yu, Yufei Ding, Mingsheng Ying, Yuan Xie

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