Giulio CHIRIBELLA

• Member, The Hong Kong Young Academy of Sciences
• Professor, Director of QICI Quantum Information and Computation Initiative, School of Computer and Data Science, The University of Hong Kong

Prof. Giulio Chiribella is a leading scholar in the field of quantum information theory. He has made pioneering contributions to quantum networks, quantum causality, and the foundations of quantum mechanics. His research provides the foundation for a new generation of quantum technologies that can overcome the limits of conventional information processing protocols, achieving higher security, higher precision, and higher computational power.

Prof. Chiribella obtained his PhD in 2007 from the University of Pavia, Italy. His doctoral research was awarded the prestigious "Hermann Weyl Prize" in recognition of his pioneering work on the application of group theoretical methods in Quantum Information Theory (2010). Later, he received a 1000 Talents Plan of China Young Investigator Award (2012), a CIFAR-Azrieli Global Scholar Award (2016), a Croucher Senior Research Fellowship (2018), and an RGC Senior Research Fellowship (2020). Before his current appointment, he served as Associate Professor at Tsinghua University and as Professor at the University of Oxford.  

His best known contributions are the information-theoretic axiomatization of quantum theory, the method of quantum combs, and the quantum SWITCH. The information-theoretic axiomatization of quantum theory, with Mauro D’Ariano and Paolo Perinotti, succeeded in reconstructing the rules of quantum theory from simple principles of information processing. This achievement, which provides a solution to a long-standing open problem dating back to Birkhoff and Von Neumann, is at the basis of the book “Quantum Theory from First Principles,” published by Cambridge University Press in 2017. The method of quantum combs is widely adopted for studying networks of quantum devices, testing their behavior, and analyzing their performances. It provides the foundation for the study of quantum causal networks, and for the development of new quantum algorithms for the discovery of cause-effect relations at the quantum scale. The invention of the quantum SWITCH pioneered a new research field on the study of processes where the order of events is indefinite. The quantum SWITCH stimulated new experiments in quantum photonics, and new applications in quantum communication, computation, metrology, and thermodynamics. 

At HKU, Prof. Chiribella established QICI, the Quantum Information and Computation Initiative of the Department of Computer Science, with the aim of promoting the development of quantum information, and to contribute to the growth of Hong Kong into an international hub for quantum technologies.