Advanced Topics in Programming Languages (ATPL)

This course provides an introduction to state-of-the-art research within an area of programming languages involving theory, design, reasoning, implementation and/or application of programming languages. It acquaints students with performing and communicating independent research in project form.  The course consists of lectures and subsequent group (2-4 persons) seminar presentations and mini-projects. The mini-projects may consist of theoretical investigations, software construction or a combination of these. Master's thesis projects will be offered in continuation of the course.  The particular research topic(s) may change from year to year; see below for this year's topics. 

In 2024, the course is about *hybrid quantum-classical computing*. In the foreseeable future, addressing challenging real-world problems using future quantum computers will require a hybrid approach, combining massively parallel classical high-performance computing (HPC) on big data, with the delegation of intricate subproblems on relatively small data sets to quantum computers.

The course covers

• hardware-agnostic high-level programming that combines quantum algorithms and classical data-parallel algorithms; 
• an intermediate language for optimization and approximation;
• and code generation that targets a mix of quantum computers and GPUs.  

The course is planned to be conducted with access to state-of-the-art quantum and HPC hardware in partnership with IBM and Nvidia, and in collaboration with researchers in quantum chemistry where quantum computing promises to achieve quantum superiority on significant real-world problems first.

Introductions to relevant background topics (multilinear algebra using braket notation, quantum computation, tensor networks, reversible computing, functional array programming) will be given in the beginning of the course.