Touheed Anwar Atif awarded Rackham Predoctoral Fellowship for his research on quantum information and quantum computing

ECE PhD student, Touheed Anwar Atif, has been awarded a Rackham Predoctoral Fellowship to support his research addressing quantum information network coding problems to enhance performance.

The advancement of quantum information and quantum computing could be the foundation of the next information revolution. Quantum information is significantly more secure and tamper-proof, and it’s providing new insights into the inner workings of the physical world.

However, many quantum communication and computation algorithms require a large number of entangled quantum bits (qubits) for storing and processing tasks, but the current state-of-the-art quantum computers can only operate on a small fraction of the necessary qubits. A major obstacle is decoherence, which refers to all the processes that contribute to the decay of information coded in a quantum register. As the system size increases, decoherence rates increase, and quantum information becomes more fragile and increasingly susceptible to errors.

Atif works to overcome this challenge by employing a large network of limited-capacity quantum computers. Specifically, he developed a novel coding framework to address quantum information network coding problems. He focused on the issues of (a) quantifying “relevant information” within quantum measurements performed in a distributed fashion and (b) improving the performance of multiple-access networks, but his approach is quite general finding its application in purity distillation and interference mitigation in networks of three or more terminals. His work has helped uncover new insights into the world of quantum information.

“My goal was to study the fundamental limits of distributed quantum problems and enhance their performance by exploiting the structure inherent to these problems using asymptotically good Algebraic codes,” Atif said.

Atif’s proposed dissertation title is, “Distributed Measurement Compression and Capacity Results for Quantum Network Problems using Algebraic Structured Approach.” He’s advised by Prof. Sandeep Pradhan.

Atif earned his B.Tech in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad and his MS in ECE from the University of Michigan. In addition to his PhD in ECE, Atif is also currently earning an MS in Applied Mathematics from the University of Michigan.