#2 My First Academic Publication

- It has been a busy few weeks for me since the academic year came to a close in the middle of May. I had the opportunity to travel to Shenzhen, China for the 2024 IEEE World Congress on Services to present research that I had conducted over the past year which was accepted for publication in the proceedings of the international conference on Quantum Software (QSW).

Over the past year, whilst also working towards completing my degree at Newcastle University, I have had the pleasure of working with two of my previous lecturers, Dr. Sadegh Soudjani & Dr. Paolo Zuliani, as well as one of their PhD students Marco Lewis on the uses of genetic algorithms for quantum state preparation whilst also attempting to optimise for T-Count. We trialled the developed solution on many different quantum state preparation problems and the results we found were more or less what were expected of this method. One thing that was interesting to note that unfortunately we didn't have time to evaluate more was the potential ability for genetically generated solutions to be more optimal after circuit transpilation compared with other state preparation methods. For more information and to see the paper in full click here for a link to the arXiv version.

Overall, my first experience of performing and presenting academic research has been incredibly insightful. The lessons I have learned over the past year have helped tremendously in other aspects of my academic career, in particular my masters thesis. The guidance from Drs. Soudjani and Zuliani, and Marco Lewis has been invaluable and is something I will be able to carry going forward hopefully within my career in quantum computing research.

If there are any questions related to the paper or just my general experiences, don't hesitate to e-mail me here!

Thanks for reading, here's to hopefully one of many posts about my research!