An avid chef who practices meditation, British education (by Germany, Hong Kong, Japan, Taiwan, Canada), a skilled chef in China and classic violins: at the young age of 29, Hlér Kristjánsson has a touch of rare birds about him.
In his professional life, the fact that he is also a computer scientist specializing in quantum basics, including quantum theory and quantum machine learning, places him in an expanded group of globally oriented scientists who have clearly set him up for the future.
In January, Hlér joined the University of Montreal's Computer Science and Operations Research Office as an assistant professor at the Mila -Quebec AI Institute, becoming the third person to be awarded research committee chair at Udem's Courtois Institute in June.
His goal here is to “promote basic research at the intersection of quantum computing, AI and materials science,” with an emphasis on “understanding the fundamental concepts of quantum information such as causality.”
More importantly, he strives to “utilise this understanding to rigorously demonstrate the quantum advantages of information processing tasks such as physical systems, quantum communication, and quantum algorithms to simulate quantum machine learning.”
We caught up with a budding computer scientist this summer, asking ten questions about his career, his career, what he brought him to Udem, and what he wanted to achieve here.
