The robot in the kitchen: The cultural politics of care-work and the development of in-home assistive technology

This paper considers two trends at opposite ends of the new economy: low-paid in-home care work, and the development of high-tech “social” robots. At present, the work of caring for the elderly, disabled, and convalescents is done primarily by women (disproportionately women of color) in the space of the home (Pratt, 1999). Meanwhile, in robotics labs at elite research universities and industry think-tanks in the U.S., Europe, and Japan, prototypes are being developed to take over some of this labor. Considered together, these two phenomena raise a number of questions, including: how might ideas about gender and race shape the development of assistive technologies; what does development in this field mean for understandings about technology’s “place” in our lives; and, potentially, even for those who rely on carework for their livelihood? The space of the home carries great cultural and symbolic significance (England, 2000). Allowing robots into this space to help us with our most private tasks would mark an unprecedented level of intimacy in our relationship with technology. While a “nursebot” may be able to measure vital signs, how would the replacement of a human care-giver with an assistive technology alter the relationship between the person being cared-for and the world outside? Drawing on disciplinary frames of Cultural Geography and Science and Technology Studies, this paper explores the social politics, and possible futures, of in-home assistive technology

Fast Quantum Search Algorithms in Protein Sequence Comparison - Quantum Biocomputing

Quantum search algorithms are considered in the context of protein sequence comparison in biocomputing. Given a sample protein sequence of length m (i.e m residues), the problem considered is to find an optimal match in a large database containing N residues. Initially, Grover's quantum search algorithm is applied to a simple illustrative case - namely where the database forms a complete set of states over the 2^m basis states of a m qubit register, and thus is known to contain the exact sequence of interest. This example demonstrates explicitly the typical O(sqrt{N}) speedup on the classical O(N) requirements. An algorithm is then presented for the (more realistic) case where the database may contain repeat sequences, and may not necessarily contain an exact match to the sample sequence. In terms of minimizing the Hamming distance between the sample sequence and the database subsequences the algorithm finds an optimal alignment, in O(sqrt{N}) steps, by employing an extension of Grover's algorithm, due to Boyer, Brassard, Hoyer and Tapp for the case when the number of matches is not a priori known.Comment: LaTeX, 5 page

Quantum Probabilistic Subroutines and Problems in Number Theory

We present a quantum version of the classical probabilistic algorithms $\grave{a}$ la Rabin. The quantum algorithm is based on the essential use of Grover's operator for the quantum search of a database and of Shor's Fourier transform for extracting the periodicity of a function, and their combined use in the counting algorithm originally introduced by Brassard et al. One of the main features of our quantum probabilistic algorithm is its full unitarity and reversibility, which would make its use possible as part of larger and more complicated networks in quantum computers. As an example of this we describe polynomial time algorithms for studying some important problems in number theory, such as the test of the primality of an integer, the so called 'prime number theorem' and Hardy and Littlewood's conjecture about the asymptotic number of representations of an even integer as a sum of two primes.Comment: 9 pages, RevTex, revised version, accepted for publication on PRA: improvement in use of memory space for quantum primality test algorithm further clarified and typos in the notation correcte

Effects of Noisy Oracle on Search Algorithm Complexity

Grover's algorithm provides a quadratic speed-up over classical algorithms for unstructured database or library searches. This paper examines the robustness of Grover's search algorithm to a random phase error in the oracle and analyzes the complexity of the search process as a function of the scaling of the oracle error with database or library size. Both the discrete- and continuous-time implementations of the search algorithm are investigated. It is shown that unless the oracle phase error scales as O(N^(-1/4)), neither the discrete- nor the continuous-time implementation of Grover's algorithm is scalably robust to this error in the absence of error correction.Comment: 16 pages, 4 figures, submitted to Phys. Rev.

Grover search with pairs of trapped ions

The desired interference required for quantum computing may be modified by the wave function oscillations for the implementation of quantum algorithms[Phys.Rev.Lett.84(2000)1615]. To diminish such detrimental effect, we propose a scheme with trapped ion-pairs being qubits and apply the scheme to the Grover search. It can be found that our scheme can not only carry out a full Grover search, but also meet the requirement for the scalable hot-ion quantum computing. Moreover, the ion-pair qubits in our scheme are more robust against the decoherence and the dissipation caused by the environment than single-particle qubits proposed before.Comment: RevTe

Geometric Strategy for the Optimal Quantum Search

We explore quantum search from the geometric viewpoint of a complex projective space $CP$, a space of rays. First, we show that the optimal quantum search can be geometrically identified with the shortest path along the geodesic joining a target state, an element of the computational basis, and such an initial state as overlaps equally, up to phases, with all the elements of the computational basis. Second, we calculate the entanglement through the algorithm for any number of qubits $n$ as the minimum Fubini-Study distance to the submanifold formed by separable states in Segre embedding, and find that entanglement is used almost maximally for large $n$. The computational time seems to be optimized by the dynamics as the geodesic, running across entangled states away from the submanifold of separable states, rather than the amount of entanglement itself.Comment: revtex, 10 pages, 7 eps figures, uses psfrag packag

An entanglement monotone derived from Grover's algorithm

This paper demonstrates that how well a state performs as an input to Grover's search algorithm depends critically upon the entanglement present in that state; the more entanglement, the less well the algorithm performs. More precisely, suppose we take a pure state input, and prior to running the algorithm apply local unitary operations to each qubit in order to maximize the probability P_max that the search algorithm succeeds. We prove that, for pure states, P_max is an entanglement monotone, in the sense that P_max can never be decreased by local operations and classical communication.Comment: 7 page

Experimental requirements for Grover's algorithm in optical quantum computation

The field of linear optical quantum computation (LOQC) will soon need a repertoire of experimental milestones. We make progress in this direction by describing several experiments based on Grover's algorithm. These experiments range from a relatively simple implementation using only a single non-scalable CNOT gate to the most complex, requiring two concatenated scalable CNOT gates, and thus form a useful set of early milestones for LOQC. We also give a complete description of basic LOQC using polarization-encoded qubits, making use of many simplifications to the original scheme of Knill, Laflamme, and Milburn.Comment: 9 pages, 8 figure

Solving the Shortest Vector Problem in Lattices Faster Using Quantum Search

By applying Grover's quantum search algorithm to the lattice algorithms of Micciancio and Voulgaris, Nguyen and Vidick, Wang et al., and Pujol and Stehl\'{e}, we obtain improved asymptotic quantum results for solving the shortest vector problem. With quantum computers we can provably find a shortest vector in time $2^{1.799n + o(n)}$, improving upon the classical time complexity of $2^{2.465n + o(n)}$ of Pujol and Stehl\'{e} and the $2^{2n + o(n)}$ of Micciancio and Voulgaris, while heuristically we expect to find a shortest vector in time $2^{0.312n + o(n)}$, improving upon the classical time complexity of $2^{0.384n + o(n)}$ of Wang et al. These quantum complexities will be an important guide for the selection of parameters for post-quantum cryptosystems based on the hardness of the shortest vector problem.Comment: 19 page

Anisotropic flow of charged hadrons, pions and (anti-)protons measured at high transverse momentum in Pb-Pb collisions at sNN=2.76\sqrt{s_{\rm NN}}=2.76 TeV

The elliptic, $v_2$, triangular, $v_3$, and quadrangular, $v_4$, azimuthal anisotropic flow coefficients are measured for unidentified charged particles, pions and (anti-)protons in Pb-Pb collisions at $\sqrt{s_{\rm NN}} = 2.76$ TeV with the ALICE detector at the Large Hadron Collider. Results obtained with the event plane and four-particle cumulant methods are reported for the pseudo-rapidity range $|\eta|<0.8$ at different collision centralities and as a function of transverse momentum, $p_{\rm T}$, out to $p_{\rm T}=20$ GeV/$c$. The observed non-zero elliptic and triangular flow depends only weakly on transverse momentum for $p_{\rm T}>8$ GeV/$c$. The small $p_{\rm T}$ dependence of the difference between elliptic flow results obtained from the event plane and four-particle cumulant methods suggests a common origin of flow fluctuations up to $p_{\rm T}=8$ GeV/$c$. The magnitude of the (anti-)proton elliptic and triangular flow is larger than that of pions out to at least $p_{\rm T}=8$ GeV/$c$ indicating that the particle type dependence persists out to high $p_{\rm T}$.Comment: 16 pages, 5 captioned figures, authors from page 11, published version, figures at http://aliceinfo.cern.ch/ArtSubmission/node/186