Graduate

Photonic circuits are a promising platform for quantum computation and quantum communication: they don't require low temperatures or vacuum to operate and they can be built on a small chip. It would be wonderful to be able to design photonic circuits for any desired purpose, however in general this is a difficult task which we would much rather automate. In this talk I will present a new method to optimize photonic circuits (through differentiable simulation), which is about 100x faster than the previous state of the art. This allows us to automate the design of photonic devices, by starting with a random circuit and optimizing it until it achieves the desired behaviour. The added speed of our method allows us to design larger circuits and to achieve a much higher accuracy than it was previously possible. The talk is designed to be accessible to non-experts and will cover the basics of quantum optics, optical gates, photonic circuits and differentiable simulation.

Dear EE Community,

We would like to welcome everyone to Autumn Quarter 20-21! There have been many changes due to the pandemic and you all have done a great job with adapting to these new and remote conditions. To welcome everyone to the new academic year, please join us for an EE Town Hall Meeting.

We would like to connect with everyone, see how everyone's feeling, welcome any comments, and answer any questions you may have regarding what's going on in our community for this autumn quarter.

We hope you can make it!

Please RSVP by 9am on Friday, October 2 note: please submit up to 3 questions on the RSVP form. You can also ask questions during the meeting using the chat function.

These informal & informational lunches consist of several students and faculty. There is no set agenda during the discussion and it is completely informal. Students are encouraged to share their experience within the department, research, their plans, and feedback. 

Registration is required.

Sign up as soon as you can because the roundtable discussion session is very popular and fills up quickly! Space is limited; you will receive a confirmation email if you are confirmed to attend. Please contact Tiffany, Student Life Coordinator if you have any questions, tdtran@stanford.edu. Thank you!

The student/faculty roundtable discussions are organized by the Student Life Committee.

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Elections rely on people, hardware, and software, all of which are fallible and subject to manipulation. Well resourced nation-states continue to attack U.S. elections and domestic election fraud is not unheard of. Voting equipment is built by private vendors--some foreign, but all using foreign parts. Many states even oursource election reporting to foreign firms. How can we conduct and check elections in a way that provides evidence that the reported winners really won--despite malfunctions and malfeasance? Evidence-based elections require voter-verified (generally, hand-marked) paper ballots kept demonstrably secure throughout the canvass and manual audits of election results against the trustworthy paper trail. Hand-marked paper ballots are far more trustworthy than machine-marked ballots for a variety of reasons. Two kinds of audits are required to provide affirmative evidence that outcomes are correct: _compliance audits_ to establish whether the paper trail is complete and trustworthy, and _risk-limiting audits_ (RLAs). RLAs test the hypothesis that an accurate manual tabulation of the votes would find that one or more reported winners did not win. To reject that hypothesis means there is convincing evidence that a full hand tally would confirm the reported results. For a broad variety of social choice functions, including plurality, multi-winner plurality, supermajority, proportional representation rules such as D'Hondt, Borda count, approval voting, and instant-runoff voting (aka ranked-choice voting), the hypothesis that one or more outcomes is wrong can be reduced to the hypothesis that the means of one or more lists of nonnegative numbers is not greater than 1/2. Martingale methods for testing such nonparametric hypotheses sequentially are especially practical. RLAs are in law in several states and have been piloted in more than a dozen; there have been roughly 60 pilots in jurisdictions of all sizes, including roughly 10 audits of statewide contests. Open-source software to support RLAs is available.

Suggested Readings:
● "Sets of Half-Average Nulls Generate Risk-Limiting Audits: SHANGRLA"
● "Ballot-marking devices cannot assure the will of the voters"
● "Evidence-Based Elections: Create a Meaningful Paper Trail, Then Audit"
● "Testing Cannot Tell Whether Ballot-Marking Devices Alter Election Outcomes"

* Subscribe to the BIODS260 Workshop list via their abstracts page to receive one-click access details directly!