Sandy Irani

About

Sandy Irani received her Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in 1991. Following her doctoral studies, she was a University of California President's Postdoctoral Fellow at UCSD. She joined the faculty of UC Irvine in 1992 and is currently a full professor and Associate Dean for Student Affairs at the Donald Bren School of Information & Computer Sciences. Her research has primarily focused on algorithm design and analysis, with an emphasis on applications to computing systems. In recent years, she has been working in the fields of Quantum Computation and Quantum Information Science.

Research topics

• Mathematics
• Physics
• Computer Science
• Artificial Intelligence
• Mathematical optimization
• Quantum mechanics
• Theoretical physics
• Applied mathematics
• Statistical physics
• Medical education

Selected publications

• Intractability of Electronic Structure in a Fixed Basis

  PRX Quantum · 2022 · 26 citations

  Finding the ground-state energy of electrons subject to an external electric field is a fundamental problem in computational chemistry. While the theory of QMA-completeness has been instrumental in understanding the complexity of finding ground states in many-body quantum systems, prior to this work it has been unknown whether or not the special form of the Hamiltonian for the electronic structure of molecules can be exploited to find ground states efficiently or whether the problem remains hard…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Hamiltonian complexity in the thermodynamic limit

  2022 · 10 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  Despite immense progress in quantum Hamiltonian complexity in the past decade, little is known about the computational complexity of quantum physics at the thermodynamic limit. In fact, even defining the problem properly is not straight forward. We study the complexity of estimating the ground energy of a fixed, translationally-invariant (TI) Hamiltonian in the thermodynamic limit, to within a given precision; this precision (given by n the number of bits of the approximation) is the sole input…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Incorporating Active Learning Strategies and Instructor Presence into an Online Discrete Mathematics Class

  2020 · 10 citations

  1st authorCorresponding

  Online education offers an attractive alternative to face-to-face classes by providing flexibility to students and efficiencies for educational institutions. Leveraging online technology has the potential to help computer science departments offer a quality educational experience in the face of burgeoning enrollments. However, effective online course design is critical to student satisfaction and learning outcomes. In this paper, we describe the experience of converting a large face-to-face cour…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Quantum Search-To-Decision Reductions and the State Synthesis Problem

  DROPS (Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz Center for Informatics) · 2021-11-04 · 7 citations

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  It is a useful fact in classical computer science that many search problems are reducible to decision problems; this has led to decision problems being regarded as the $\textit{de facto}$ computational task to study in complexity theory. In this work, we explore search-to-decision reductions for quantum search problems, wherein a quantum algorithm makes queries to a classical decision oracle to output a desired quantum state. In particular, we focus on search-to-decision reductions for $\mathsf{…

  PublisherDOI

• Modified Iterative Quantum Amplitude Estimation is Asymptotically Optimal

  Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics eBooks · 2023-01-01 · 6 citations

  book-chapter

  In this work, we provide the first QFT-free algorithm for Quantum Amplitude Estimation (QAE) that is asymptotically optimal while maintaining the leading numerical performance. QAE algorithms appear as a subroutine in many applications for quantum computers. The optimal query complexity achievable by a quantum algorithm for QAE is log queries, providing a speedup of a factor of 1/ε over any other classical algorithm for the same problem. The original algorithm for QAE utilizes the quantum Fourie…

  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• AF: Small: Ground State Complexity in Quantum Many-Body Systems

  NSF · $499k · 2009–2014

Frequent coauthors

• Yuval Rabani

  125 shared

• Ronitt Rubinfeld

  Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  124 shared

• Martı́n Farach-Colton

  122 shared

• Michael Dinitz

  121 shared

• Avrim Blum

  121 shared

• Ravi Kumar

  121 shared

• Shubhangi Saraf

  Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

  121 shared

• Robert Kleinberg

  121 shared

Awards & honors

• ACM Fellow (2023)
• Sandy Irani and Sameer Singh Receive Distinguished Faculty A…

Similar researchers at University of California, Irvine

• Pierre Baldih-121
• Gene Tsudikh-82
• Padhraic Smythh-78