Colin Blake

PhD student, Inria MOCQUA

About

I work on the algebra of quantum circuits: when two circuits should count as the same, which equations are enough to prove it, and how those equations turn into normal forms, rewrite systems, or small tools.

Affiliation
PhD student, Inria MOCQUA
Research area
Qudit circuit theory, rewriting, and compilation

I am a PhD student in quantum computing at Inria, in the MOCQUA team. My research is about when two quantum circuits should count as the same, especially in qudit settings where the right algebra is still much less settled than in the qubit world.

Because I am still a PhD student, I am not currently supervising students on my own. The project ideas on this site are therefore mostly there as collaboration directions for other researchers, or as discussion starters for students who already have formal supervision elsewhere.

In practice, that means asking which generators and relations actually describe a circuit fragment, how to make those descriptions uniform in the dimension, and how to turn them into normal forms, rewrite systems, or small pieces of software.

Current themes

  • uniform presentations for qudit circuit families in arbitrary finite dimension
  • phase-affine and controlled constructions that expose useful algebraic structure
  • rewrite systems and diagrammatic languages that can support optimisation in a principled way

Academic path

Before starting the PhD, I moved through a sequence of internships that gradually narrowed from broad formal-methods questions to circuit syntax and completeness results.

  • M2 research internship (2024) at Inria (MOCQUA), on completeness questions for qudit circuit theories.
  • M1 research internship (2023) at Inria (QuaCS), on fragments of the ZX-calculus enriched with partial transpose.
  • L3 research internship (2022) at LMF, on typed quantum circuit compilation and pattern-matching techniques for the ZX-calculus.

I hold an MPRI from ENS Paris-Saclay and a Magistere in Computer Science from Universite Paris-Saclay. That mix of theoretical computer science, formal methods, and quantum computing is still the way I like to work.