Q-CTRL Forms Technical Advisory Board From Diverse Disciplines to Accelerate Quantum Industry’s Development

(Robotics&AutomationNews) Q-CTRL, a startup that applies the principles of control engineering to make quantum technology useful, has formed a technical advisory board drawing top talent from a diverse range of disciplines to accelerate the industry’s development.
The technical advisory board will provide strategic advice to steer Q-CTRL’s efforts in developing next-generation quantum control technologies in support of both quantum computing and quantum sensing applications. Professor Michael J. Biercuk, Q-CTRL founder and CEO, says: “Our mission is to accelerate the developing greenfield quantum technology industry, and that requires critical insight from outside of our specialized discipline.

The Board Includes:
–Pieter Abbeel, professor of electrical engineering and computer science and Director of the Berkeley Robot Learning Lab at the University of California, Berkeley.
Abbeel’s research focus is deep learning and the application of machine learning to robotics. He is also the co-founder of covariant.ai, a venture-funded start-up that aims to teach robots new, complex skills.
–Jason Cong, the Volgenau Chair for Engineering Excellence in the Samueli School of Engineering and former chair of the computer science department at UCLA. Cong’s research is in automated synthesis frameworks for programmable computing architectures as well as electronic design automation and quantum computing. Cong has founded or co-founded several successful startups, including AutoESL Design Technologies, which was acquired by Xilinx in 2011 and led to the most successful FPGA high-level synthesis tool Vivado/Vitis HLS.
–Richard Murray, Thomas E. and Doris Everhart Professor of Control & Dynamical Systems at California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, California Murray is a pioneer in the field of classical control engineering with a focus on the application of feedback and control to networked systems.
–Daniela Rus, Andrew and Erna Viterbi Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and Director of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Mass. Rus’s research areas include robotics, mobile computing, and data science.
–Birgitta Whaley, professor of chemical physics and director, Berkeley Quantum Information and Computation Center at UC Berkeley. Whaley’s expertise is in quantum control theory and applications of quantum and classical feedback and control to quantum coherent systems.