Aggregating the world’s knowledge of computing: from classical to quantum

SPEAKER
Dr Anton Lokhmotov

ABSTRACT
How much do we know about computing? Not nearly as much as we must know, considering efficiency, safety and costs. There’s always a scope for improvement, but how can we avoid wasting efforts and actually do something useful? There’s a dire need to aggregate the world’s knowledge of computing and make it available in easy to reuse and build upon form. Working as a broad community of algorithm designers, software engineers, hardware vendors and even end-users, we can collaboratively start tackling hard questions like: How to make a Raspberry Pi be as responsive as a desktop? How to run deep learning in real-time in an self-driving car? How to solve quantum chemistry on a quantum computer? In the words of mathematician David Hilbert, “we must know - we will know!”

SPEAKER BIO
Dr Anton Lokhmotov is a researcher, engineer and entrepreneur. After completing his PhD in Computer Science at Cambridge, he worked as a post-doctoral researcher in Prof Paul Kelly’s group at Imperial in 2008-2009. As an engineering lead and manager of GPU Compute compilers at Arm in 2010-2015, Anton helped create the world’s first full OpenCL implementation for mobile and embedded devices, and collaborated closely with Dr Alastair Donaldson’s group at Imperial on advanced compilation and verification technologies. Anton co-founded dividiti in 2015 to pursue a vision of efficient, reliable and cheap computing everywhere, from tiny sensors to supercomputers. As CEO, he led dividiti from developing its open-source Collective Knowledge technology (http://cknowledge.org) to contracts with Fortune 50 customers, while staying true to his core values of exploration, collaboration and integrity.