PROFESSOR BOB COECKE
Chief Scientist, Quantinuum
Head of Quantum-Compositional Intelligence
In addition to his post as Chief Scientist, Professor Coecke leads Quantinuum’s Oxford-based Quantum-Compositional Intelligence research team. The team’s research efforts include work in Quantum Computational Linguistics (QCL) and its practical implementation, Quantum Natural Language Processing (QNLP). Bob is Distinguished Visiting Research Chair at Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, Emeritus Professor at Wolfson College, Oxford University, and a Visiting Fellow at Oxford’s Computer Science and Mathematics Departments, where he teaches a course on QCL.
Professor Coecke is a founding member of the Quantum Physics and Logic (QPL) and Applied Category Theory (ACT) communities, the diamond-open-access journal, Compositionality, and the Cambridge University Press, Applied Category Theory book series.
Before Quantinuum
Prior to Quantinuum, Professor Coecke taught "Picturing Quantum Processes" at the Department of Computer Science, Oxford University. In 2011, he became the first to have Quantum Foundations in a professorial title. He jokes that he started the role in 2010, therefore he was also the first professor to be in a superposition.
Coecke co-founded and led a multi-disciplinary research group. He taught at the Free University of Brussels; Imperial College, London; McGill University, Montreal; and Cambridge University. He has been awarded 33 grants, including Flanders Research Foundation, Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, Leverhulme, EU-STREP, US Office of Naval Research, and US Air Force Office of Scientific Reasearch, including three personal fellowships and the first large European Union grant within the Computer Science Department at Oxford while a post-doctoral student. Professor Coecke currently has a Foundational Questions Institute (FQXi) and a John Templeton Foundation grant.
2022
Completed writing, Quantum in Pictures, a secondary school book with Stefano Gogioso.
2020
With Giovanni de Felice, Konstantinos Meichanetzidis, and Alexis Toumi, ran the first QNLP implementation on quantum hardware.
2019
In a foundational paper, provided a mathematical foundation, DisCoCirc, for how sentences interact in a text to produce the meaning of that text.
2017
Completed the dodo book, Coecke, Bob, and Aleks Kissinger. Picturing Quantum Processes. Cambridge University Press, 2017. The volume provides a fully diagrammatic treatment of quantum theory and its applications. Dr. Kissinger is an Associate Professor of Quantum Computation, Oxford University.
2016
With Will Zeng, initiated Quantum Natural Language Processing (QNLP) foundational paper.
2013
With Rob Spekkens and Tobias Fritz, developed mathematical foundations for resource theories.
2010
With Aleks Kissinger started ZW-calculus as a valuable variation of ZX-calculus.
2008
Developed ZX-calculus with Ross Duncan as a refinement of CQM. Using CQM, with Mernoosh Sadrzadeh and Steve Clark, developed DisCoCat model of meaning for natural language.
2004
Pioneered Categorical Quantum Mechanics (CQM) with Samson Abramsky. Published foundational paper. CQM is now in AMS’s MSC2020 classification.
Professor Coecke has written three books on diagrammatic reasoning. The first, written with former PhD student, Aleks Kissinger, is a university-level text commonly referred to as the dodo book. The second book written by Bob Coecke and Aleks Kissinger, is Picturing Quantum Processes published by Cambridge University Press in 2017. The book is used in the quantum computing course at Oxford, Computer Science.
The third and most recent book, Quantum in Pictures, co-written with former PhD student, Stefano Gogioso, introduces readers of all levels of expertise – from school children, parents and general science enthusiasts to businesspeople and educators – to the central concepts of quantum theory.
Professor Coecke’s papers can be found on Google Scholar.
Find Bob’s previous PhD students in Mathematics Geneology.
Professor Coecke does accept new students
Bob’s work has been covered in various media outlets, including Forbes [1, 2], New Scientist, Physics World, Computer Weekly [1, 2], The Quantum Insider [1, 2, 3]. The Quantum Zeitgeist listed Bob as one of the twenty most influential people in quantum computing.
