Workshop on Advanced Topics in Computing 2018
26 October, 2018, Lugano, Switzerland
Quantum Computing: From Esoteric to Engineering (Ilia Polian)
We are at the verge of “quantum supremacy”. Progress with the superconductor technology has lead to realistic expectations to construct a practical quantum computer that will, for the first time, be strictly faster than its conventional counterpart. Progress is also being reported from technologies other than superconductors. At the same time, new applications emerge. In the last decades, Shor’s and Grover’s algorithms had received most of the attention, but now further application domains are being discussed, ranging from computational chemistry, material science and biology to machine learning.
Both research areas, quantum technologies and quantum algorithms, were only loosely connected In the past. One main difference between these two is the assumption on the quality of quantum states. Quantum states are extremely fragile, and significant efforts in technology research are being invested in understanding and improving the stability of quantum bits (qubits). Most quantum algorithms assume perfect qubits, which implies the need for extensive quantum error correction (QEC). Without an efficient QEC scheme, quantum technology will remain an esoteric strand of research with no real-world application, and quantum algorithms will remain esoteric computations assuming a machine that does not practically exist.
This talk will propose the need for a new discipline, quantum computing engineering, located between quantum technology and quantum algorithm and gluing the two together. This discipline can be understood as a counterpart of traditional computer engineering, which provides the link between semiconductor technology and applications of computing. The main task of quantum computer engineering will be to map a quantum algorithm to a quantum substrate, allowing a sufficient amount of quantum error correction. The talk will provide an overview of steps required for this purpose assuming state-of-the-art QEC based on surface codes. This gives rise to a design stack consisting of abstraction levels, conceptually similar to levels (system, RTL, gate, transistor, layout) used in the conventional circuit design. The talk will explain synthesis and optimization problems which show up in context of quantum computing engineering and discuss possible solutions approaches.
Programmable Microfluidics: Automating Life Science, Health, and Medical Research (Philip Brisk)
Microfluidics is the science of the controller manipulation of fluids at the micro-liter scale and below. The physical properties of fluid transport at these small volumes is quite different than at the (larger) macro-scale regime. This has enabled the engineering of a plethora of useful research and diagnostic instruments, the majority of which are now categorized as "Laboratories on a Chip" (or LoCs, for short). LoCs can be categorized as active (featuring explicit external actuation) or passive (no on-chip actuation, relying on the underlying "analog" physical properties of fluid flow); in turn, active LoCs can be categorized in terms of the underlying actuation technology, such as valving or electrostatic actuation of ionized fluids.
These innovations create new opportunities for cross-disciplinary research. All classes of LoCs lack an underlying design science, akin to the algorithmic approaches by which VLSI/CAD tools can assist human designers to lay out semiconductor chips. Active LoCs can be application-specific or programmable, the latter class of which necessitate the development of programming languages and compilers; integration of programmable LoCs into a fully automated wet laboratory featuring a variety of LoC and non-LoC biological/chemical instruments points toward the need for operating systems as well.
This research thrust is crucial, because there is a substantial technology gap between the users of biological instruments (scientists) and the engineers who develop them. Many scientist would like custom LoCs to miniaturize and automate their experiments, but they lack the expertise to design, fabricate, test, and validate such a device, as well as access to the necessary equipment. A handful of well-funded research laboratories have the requisite cross-disciplinary expertise, but they are the exception, not the rule. If successful, this research effort will increase the productivity of life science practitioners across all fields, similar to how the advent of computing technology, which initially automated scientific computation, has evolved into a pervasive complement to our daily lives.
Challenges of the Open Source HW movement (Frank Gürkaynak)
The open source software has been instrumental in many of the recent technological developments we enjoy these days. There is hope that open source hardware will also start playing an important role in the future, it can be said that open source hardware is roughly at the point where open source software was 25 years ago. While the underlying principles are the same, there are several factors which make adoption of open source hardware more challenging. In this talk, I will try to explain the issues based on our experience on working with the PULP project the last 5 years and our discussions with companies both large and small, academia/research centers, and enthusiasts.
The uphill battle for privacy in a pervasive computing world (Paolo Palmieri)
"Privacy is dead, get over it", Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, famously said a few years ago (or so the story goes). But the real threat to privacy, rather than social media, comes from pervasive sensing and artificial intelligence. This talk will explore new definitions for what some regard as an outdated concept, and will highlights how cryptographic solutions, rather than anonymity, are the way forward for privacy enhancing technologies.
Paolo Palmieri is a Lecturer in Cyber Security at the School of Computer Science, University College Cork, Ireland. He holds a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree from the University of Bologna, Italy, and a PhD from the Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium. His research in cyber security focuses on cryptography, privacy and anonymity, and his interests include secure computation, privacy-enhancing technologies, anonymity protocols, location privacy and security of smart cities.
Energy efficiency in Lightweight cryptography (Subhadeep Banik)
In the last few years, the field of lightweight cryptography has seen an influx in the number of block ciphers and hash functions being proposed. One of the metrics that define a good lightweight design is the energy consumed per unit operation of the algorithm. For block
ciphers, this operation is the encryption of one plaintext. By studying the energy consumption model of a CMOS gate, we arrive at the conclusion that the total energy consumed during the encryption operation of an r-round unrolled architecture of any block cipher is a quadratic function in r. We then apply our model to 9 well known lightweight block ciphers, and thereby try to predict the optimal value of r at which an r-round unrolled architecture for a cipher is likely to be most energy efficient.
In the second part of the talk we try to design a block cipher optimized for the energy per encryption metric. We will briefly state some of the design challenges in this direction.In the final part of the talk we we look at stream ciphers with respect to their energy consumption. We find that for the purpose of encrypting large volumes of data, stream ciphers are more energy efficient.