Andrew Childs

amchilds's picture
Professor
3359 Atlantic Building
(301) 405-2329

Andrew Childs is a professor in the Department of Computer Science and the Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS). He was a Co-Director of QuICS from 2014-2024, and is the director of the NSF Quantum Leap Challenge Institute for Robust Quantum Simulation.

Childs's research interests are in the theory of quantum information processing, especially quantum algorithms. He has explored the computational power of quantum walk, providing an example of exponential speedup, demonstrating computational universality, and constructing algorithms for problems including search and formula evaluation. Childs has also developed fast quantum algorithms for simulating Hamiltonian dynamics. His other areas of interest include quantum query complexity and quantum algorithms for algebraic problems.

Before coming to UMD, Childs was a DuBridge Postdoctoral Scholar at Caltech from 2004-2007 and a faculty member in Combinatorics & Optimization and the Institute for Quantum Computing at the University of Waterloo from 2007-2014. Childs received his doctorate in physics from MIT in 2004.

Courses

Publications

2022

2021

A. M. Childs, Hung, S. - H., and Li, T., Quantum query complexity with matrix-vector products, Proceedings of the 48th International Colloquium on Automata, Languages, and Programming (ICALP 2021), Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics, vol. 198, pp. 55:1-55:19, 2021.
D. Wang, You, X., Li, T., and Childs, A. M., Quantum exploration algorithms for multi-armed bandits, Proceedings of the 35th Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2021), vol. 35, no. 11, pp. 10102-10110, 2021.
A. M. Childs, Hung, S. - H., and Li, T., Quantum Query Complexity with Matrix-Vector Products, 48th International Colloquium on Automata, Languages, and Programming (ICALP 2021), 2021.

2020

S. Ben-David, Childs, A. M., Gilyen, A., Kretschmer, W., Podder, S., and Wang, D., Symmetries, graph properties, and quantum speedups, in Proceedings of the 61st IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS 2020), pp. 649–660 (2020), 2020.
G. Alagic, Childs, A. M., Grilo, A. B., and Hung, S. - H., Non-interactive classical verification of quantum computation, Theory of Cryptography Conference (TCC), vol. Lecture Notes in Computer Science 12552, pp. 153-180, 2020.
A. Bapat, Schoute, E., Gorshkov, A. V., and Childs, A. M., Nearly optimal time-independent reversal of a spin chain, accepted for publication in Physical Review Research, 2020.
A. M. Childs and Liu, J. - P., Quantum spectral methods for differential equations, Commun. Math. Phys. , vol. 375, pp. 1427-1457, 2020.
S. Arunachalam, Belovs, A., Childs, A. M., Kothari, R., Rosmanis, A., and de Wolf, R., Quantum Coupon Collector, Proceedings of the 15th Conference on the Theory of Quantum Computation, Communication and Cryptography (TQC 2020), Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics, vol. 158, pp. 10:1-10:17, 2020.

2019

A. M. Childs and Su, Y., Nearly optimal lattice simulation by product formulas, Phys. Rev. Lett. , vol. 123, no. 050503, 2019.