Ryan Sweke
I am the Alexander von Humboldt German Research Chair of Mathematics and its Applications at the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences (AIMS), in Cape Town, South Africa. I am also affiliated with the Department of Mathematical Sciences at Stellenbosch University, and I am an associate of the National Institute for Theoretical and Computational Sciences (NITheCS). Before joining AIMS I spent just over two years at IBM Quantum, and before that five years as a post-doc in the group of Jens Eisert at the Freie Universität Berlin.
I have broad research interests at the intersection of quantum computing, machine learning, cryptography and theoretical computer science. An up-to-date list of my publications can be found on Google Scholar.
I am slowly building a research group at AIMS. If you are a prospective Ph.D. student or post-doc, please see the opportunities page for more information on open positions and relevant fellowships.
I can be contacted via rsweke@aims.ac.za
news
| Jul 01, 2025 | I now have two PhD positions and one postdoctoral fellowship available in my group. See the linked advertisements for more information, and please apply if you are interested! |
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| Jun 26, 2025 | Our new pre-print “Efficient Quantum Gibbs Sampling with Local Circuits” appeared today on the arXiv. |
| Apr 17, 2025 | I will be program committee co-chair (together with Maria Schuld) for QTML 2025, in Singapore. |
| Mar 31, 2025 | Our new pre-print “Kernel-based dequantization of variational QML without Random Fourier Features” appeared today on the arXiv. |
| Mar 26, 2025 | Our new pre-print “New perspectives on quantum kernels through the lens of entangled tensor kernels” appeared today on the arXiv. |
| Mar 18, 2025 | Press release and short profile from Stellenbosch University. |
| Mar 12, 2025 | I gave a talk at WITS University entitled “The Potential and Limitations of Quantum Machine Learning” as part of the WITS\IBM seminar series. |
| Mar 03, 2025 | A nice profile of me appeared today, as featured scientist of NITheCS for March 2025. |
| Feb 24, 2025 | I gave a NITheCS colloquium entitled “Quantum Computing: Challenges and Opportunities” (video). |
| Feb 20, 2025 | Our paper “Potential and limitations of random Fourier features for dequantizing quantum machine learning” appeared in print in Quantum! I previously gave a talk about this work at IPAM (video). |
| Jan 24, 2025 | I gave a talk at Stellenbosch University entitled “Should we use parameterized quantum circuits for machine learning?” as a QSUN, SAQuTI and NITheCS seminar. |
| Jan 06, 2025 | I have officially started as German Research Chair of Mathematics and its Applications at AIMS! |