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Bob Coecke

Personal photo - Bob Coecke

Professor Bob Coecke

Visiting Fellow

Emeritus Fellow, Wolfson College

E: bob.coecke (a) quantinuum.com
T: +44 7881 333990

Interests

I was Professor of Quantum Foundations, Logics and Structures 2011-2021, Lecturer of Quantum Computer Science 2007-2011, EPSRC Advenced Research Fellow 2004-2009, Postdoc 2001-2003, and created and headed the Quantum Group, here at the Department of Computer Science.  My main affiliation is now Quantinuum, where I am Chief Scientist and lead the Oxford-based Quantum-Compositional Intelligence team, and am also a Distinguished Visiting Research Chair at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics.  I am still active at the university, where I mainly teach, supervise and mentor, here at the Department of Computer Science and also at the Mathematical Institute.  At Wolfson College, where I am Emeritus Fellow, I lead the Quantum Foundations Research Cluster.  At Oxford's Department of Computer Science, I subversively obtained the 1st ever large EU grant in 2006, ignoring an embargo by the head administrator, paving the way for many others to obtain EU grants, and I also take pride in taking the lead in some more necessary rebelions.

Below is a brief bio and here is my Quantinuum webpage with a more detailed bio

You can contact me by email at bob [.] coecke [@] quantinuum [.] com

My courses: 

 

Biography

I am Chief Scientist at Quantinuum, head Quantinuum's Oxford-based Quantum NLP & Compositional Intelligence sub-team, I am Distinguished Visiting Research Chair at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, I am Emeritus Fellow at Wolfson College Oxford, and Visiting Fellow at the Computer Science Department and the Mathematical Institute of Oxford University. Previously I was Professor of Quantum Foundations, Logics and Structures at the Department of Computer Science at Oxford University, where I was 20 years, and co-founded and led a multi-disciplinary Quantum Group that grew to 50 members and I supervised close to 70 PhD students.  I am still supervising, at Oxford and elsewhere, and also still teach at Oxford's Mathematical Institute. I pioneered Categorical Quantum Mechanics (now in AMS's MSC2020 classification), ZX-calculus, DisCoCat natural language meaning, mathematical foundations for resource theories, Quantum Natural Language Processing, and DisCoCirc natural language meaning.   I co-authored Picturing Quantum Processes, with Aleks Kissinger, a book providing a fully diagrammatic treatment of quantum theory and its applications. I co-authored Quantum in Pictures, with Stefano Gogioso, which does the same, but now accessible to people with no maths background.  I co-authored some 200 research papers. I obtained approx. 35 grants, including from NFWO, EPSRC, Leverhulme, EU, ONR, AFOSR, FQXi, JTF.  I still hold grants with the latter two.  I am a founding father of the QPL (Quantum Physics and Logic) and ACT (Applied Category Theory) communities, of the diamond-open-access journal Compositionality, and Cambridge University Press' Applied Category Theory book series. I was the first person to have Quantum Foundations as part of his academic title. My work has been headlined by various media outlets, including Forbes, New Scientist, PhysicsWorld, ComputerWeekly.

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Activities

Completed Projects

Current Students

Past Students

Andrei Akhvlediani
Yaared Al-Mehairi
Philip Atzemoglou
Krzysztof Bar
Ed Blakey
(University of Bristol)
Josef Bolt
Gareth Charnock
Cole Comfort
Carmen Constantin
Oscar Cunningham
Giovanni de Felice
Nadish de Silva
William Edwards
(Perimeter Institute)
Brendan Fong
Fabrizio Romano Genovese
Edward Grefenstette
Amar Hadzihasanovic
(RIMS, Kyoto University)
James Hefford
Ben Jackson
Nal Kalchbrenner
Hlér Kristjánsson
Ciaran Lee
Yoshihiro Maruyama
Alex Merry
Hector Miller-Bakewell
Hugo Nava Kopp
Kang Feng Ng
Karl Paulsson
Robin Piedeleu
Nicola Pinzani
David Quick
Andre Ranchin
(Imperial College London)
Irene Rizzo
Subhayan Roy Moulik
Maria Stasinou
Sean Tull
Sander Uijlen
Quanlong Wang
Vincent Wang
Olivia Waring
Matthew Wilson
Norihiro Yamada
Vladimir Zamdzhiev
Yu Zhang
Maaike Zwart