Identifying cause-effect relations is a fundamental primitive in a variety of areas of science and technology. The identification of causal relations is generally accomplished through statistical trials where alternative hypotheses about the causal relations are tested against each other. Traditionally, such trials have been based on classical statistics. But while classical statistics effectively describes the behavior of macroscopic variables, it becomes inadequate at the microscopic scale, described by quantum mechanics, where a richer spectrum of causal relations is accessible. In the past years, there has been an increasing interest in the study of causal relations among quantum variables. In this talk, Professor Giulio Chiribella will show that the counterintuitive features of quantum mechanics can be turned to our advantage, providing speed-ups in the identification of causal relations. These speed-ups have applications to the design of automated quantum machines and new quantum communication protocols.
Giulio Chiribella is the founder and director of QICI Quantum Information and Computation Initiative at the HKU Department of Computer Science. In 2010, he was awarded the Hermann Weyl Prize 2010. In 2020 and 2018, he received Senior Research Fellowships from the Hong Kong Research Grant Council (RGC) and from the Croucher Foundation, respectively. He currently serves as an elected member of the Hong Kong Young Academy of Sciences, as a visiting professor at the University of Oxford, and as an editorial board member of the journal Communications in Mathematical Physics. Previously, he held faculty positions at the University of Oxford and at Tsinghua University.
Clean water and clean air are vital for public health. This project focuses on developing high-efficiency and environmentally sustainable filters for removing harmful air/water pollutants. The team has developed novel architectures and functionalities for the filters to achieve high permeance, high removal efficiency, and excellent reusability.
