Francisca Vasconcelos

CS PhD @ UC Berkeley Theory Group and BAIR Lab.

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francisca @ berkeley.edu

I am a second-year PhD student and NSF Graduate Research Fellow in the UC Berkeley Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. I am co-advised by Profs Michael Jordan and Umesh Vazirani. My research interests lie at the intersection of quantum computation and machine learning theory.

In 2020, I received a BS in EECS and Physics from MIT, where I was fortunate to do substantial undergraduate research advised by Prof William Oliver in the MIT Engineering Quantum Systems group. As an undergraduate, I also interned under Dr. Marcus da Silva at Rigetti Computing and Microsoft Research Quantum. Supported by a Rhodes Scholarship, I received two masters from the University of Oxford: an MSc in Statistical Sciences and MSt in Philosophy of Physics. Following from the MSc, I performed statistical ML research in the OxCSML group, advised by Prof Yee Whye Teh.

I am also the Founding Academic Director of the Qubit x Qubit (QxQ) initiative of The Coding School (TCS) non-profit. Since 2019, we have taught 20,000+ diverse K-12 students, undergraduates, and members of the workforce worldwide about the fundamentals of quantum computing and QISE.

selected publications

  1. spie_qed.jpg
    Why Quantum Education?
    Francisca Vasconcelos
    SPIE Photonics Focus, May 2023
  2. uncertainr.png
    UncertaINR: Uncertainty Quantification of End-to-End Implicit Neural Representations for Computed Tomography
    Francisca Vasconcelos, Bobby He, Nalini Singh, and Yee Whye Teh
    Transactions on Machine Learning Research (TMLR), May 2023
    🎓 Oxford MSc in Statistical Sciences Thesis
    Early version of work (Abstract) also presented at NeurIPS 2021 workshops:
    Med-NeurIPS (Oral - 6.66% Acceptance Rate) & Bayesian Deep Learning (Poster)
  3. cosmic.jpg
    Impact of ionizing radiation on superconducting qubit coherence
    Antti P Vepsäläinen, Amir H Karamlou, John L Orrell, Akshunna S Dogra, Ben Loer, Francisca Vasconcelos, and 7 more authors
    Nature, May 2020
    ⭐ Featured in MIT News
  4. gen_photon.jpg
    Generating spatially entangled itinerant photons with waveguide quantum electrodynamics
    Bharath Kannan, Daniel L Campbell, Francisca Vasconcelos, Roni Winik, David K Kim, Morten Kjaergaard, and 7 more authors
    Science advances, May 2020
    ⭐ Featured in MIT News