On students as therapy

This summer, I’m delighted to report, we’ve had four (!) students complete their PhDs in computer science through UT Austin’s Quantum Information Center:

• Dr. Ruizhe Zhang, student of my wife Dana Moshkovitz, who’s worked on numerous topics in quantum algorithms, optimization, meta-complexity, and machine learning, and who’s continuing to a postdoc at the Simons Institute in Berkeley.
• Dr. Daniel Liang, student of me, who’s worked on efficient learning of stabilizer and near-stabilizer states, and who’s continuing to a postdoc at Rice University.
• Dr. Jiahui Liu, student of me, who’s worked on quantum copy-protection, quantum money, and other quantum cryptographic functionalities, and who’s continuing to a postdoc at MIT.
• Dr. William Kretschmer, student of me, who’s worked on quantum query complexity, oracle separations between quantum complexity classes, pseudorandom quantum states, and much more, and who’s continuing to a postdoc at the Simons Institute in Berkeley.

A fifth, Dr. Yuxuan Zhang, completed his PhD in condensed-matter physics.

We also had two postdocs finish this summer:

• Dr. Jason Pollack, who’s worked at the intersection of quantum information and quantum gravity (including, with me, on Discrete Bulk Reconstruction), and who’s starting as an Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Syracuse University.
• Dr. Shih-Han Hung, who’s worked on quantum cryptographic protocols (including, with me, on Certified Randomness from Quantum Supremacy), and who’s still deciding between offers.

All told, I’ve now supervised or co-supervised a total of 12 PhD students and 15 postdocs (see my homepage for the complete list). I’m ridiculously proud of all of them; along with my kids, they’re one of the central joys of my life.

While there are many reasons to want to celebrate this news, I confess that among them is thumbing my nose at haters. This past week, Shtetl-Optimized endured yet another sustained troll attack. One troll claimed that my use of the names “Alice” and “Bob,” in discussing communication protocols, was Eurocentric and offensive, and threatened to contact UT Austin’s DEI office about this matter and whip up dozens of students to protest outside my office. A second troll (or was it the same troll?) accused my Chinese students of being spies and called them a long litany of racial slurs. He also accused me of being paid off by the Chinese government, and of blogging skeptically about quantum speedup claims merely to hide the fact that China will soon build a quantum computer able to break US encryption. These trolls, and others, pursued me relentlessly by both blog comments and email—acting like I was the unreasonable one for ignoring them—until I finally broke down and engaged, calling upon the Shtetl-Optimized Committee of Guardians (who I thank profusely) for needed moral support.

The fact that there are people so far beyond the reach of reason bothers me much more than it reasonably should. But whenever the toxicity of the Internet gets me down, I try to take solace from the real world. Over the past seven years, I’m proud to have built a research group at UT Austin that’s welcomed students and postdocs and visitors from all over the world, and that’s treated them as individuals on a shared journey to understand reality. I intend to continue in that spirit for as long as I’m able.