iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Annual meeting workshop dinner at The Shed?

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With reproducible I mean between people who use it differently - I don’t think there is a prescribed way to use it which makes it hard to reproduce usage patterns between study cohorts.

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I wonder how reproducible such studies are. AI just like any other tool needs to be used properly. It’s always been true that one cannot learn if one doesn’t try understanding for oneself, and use of AI doesn’t necessarily forbid us from doing so - one just needs to stay conscious on how to use it.

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Alexander Schuckert @schuckert.org · 10/09/2026

In the natural sciences, the reaction to AI seems to be quite different to the humanities. There is a sense in which supervising AI is not that different to supervising students - professors have been able to learn despite not running lab experiments/programming simulations in the past.

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Reminds me of the conclusion of eu investigation on what helps equality in physics: simply encourage women to apply mo more

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Alexander Schuckert @schuckert.org · 07/09/2026

Yes! It seems QFT-based algorithms like phase estimation and shor is what these machines are made for (or decision problems as Ike Chuang put it for a long time). Cold atoms in optical lattice have been doing amazing science at ~minutes shot rate though!

Alexander Schuckert @schuckert.org · 17/08/2026

Based in London and interested in a "bridge postdoc" on quantum computing? We have a position available as part of our collaboration with Google to run quantum-many-body simulations on their willow chip, starting ASAP. www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DSJ367/p...

jobs.ac.uk

Postdoctoral Research Associate in Quantum Many-Body Systems at King's College London

Searching for an academic job? Explore this Postdoctoral Research Associate in Quantum Many-Body Systems opening on jobs.ac.uk! Click to view more details and browse other academic jobs.

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Alexander Schuckert @schuckert.org · 17/08/2026

Mark, what is the difference between that and someone snatching your idea and coming back a year later with a preprint having solved the problem without an LLM?

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Alexander Schuckert @schuckert.org · 17/08/2026

I so much agree with this. Also, hasn't finding the right questions always been the most important task of a researcher? I have yet to understand what the difference is between a junior researcher and an LLM in the social mechanics of science.

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Alexander Schuckert @schuckert.org · 15/08/2026

Expert bias is perhaps the wrong word. "Nobel disease" and "epistemic trespassing" is what I meant.

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Alexander Schuckert @schuckert.org · 15/08/2026

Or it's just someone with a massive expert bias giving an unfounded opinion about a research field they lack the background of.

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Alexander Schuckert @schuckert.org · 07/08/2026

This might mean that post-quantum cryptography is not post-quantum, at least not some of the current leading candidates considered by NIST eprint.iacr.org/2026/1591

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Alexander Schuckert @schuckert.org · 06/08/2026

Same is true for female scientists in male-dominated areas. I have seen them consistently needing to outperform male peers to get the same credit or opportunities.

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In particular, one postdoc position is available starting in autumn '26 (yes, that's this year) for 2+1 years.

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I am looking for candidates with an excellent track record in quantum computing, quantum simulation, quantum error correction or a closely related area, and with the ambition to work on a technically demanding direction at the frontier of the field.

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Members of my group work closely with experiments in academia (Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics, Duke, Cornell) and industry (particularly QuEra, Google and Quantinuum).

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The group is closely integrated into a network of researchers between Paris, Munich, Madrid (digianaqsim.eu) whose goal is to incorporate digital methods into analog quantum simulators.

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Alexander Schuckert @schuckert.org · 24/07/2026

I have PhD and postdoc positions available to join my group at ENS Paris, centered on designing algorithms for quantum computers in the early fault-tolerant era and sitting at the interface of theory and experiment. One position starts already in the fall of this year!

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Tesla VP of AI frustrated with public not understanding Taylor expansions: “Growth in robotaxi miles driven is literally exponential. Just it's in the early part of the exponential. "…Yes, you can call any linear growth exponential, just with a small exponent.

Note that if you get one of these grants, it is quite easy to get more funding from national funding agencies as it is the most prestigious 'seal of excellence' in Europe.

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A PhD student/postdoc typically costs around 70k/100k Euros per year (including overheads) in western European countries. Typical PhD duration is 4 years, so these grants fund ~10 PhD students!

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In the collaborative Synergy grant, a team of 2-4 PIs can ask for up to 14M Euros over 6 years.

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You can ask for 3.5M, 4, 4.5 M Euros over up to 5 years if you are <7 years (starting), <12 year (consolidator), >12 years (advanced) after your PhD. These are not collaborative grants, that's money that only goes to your group.

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Advanced and plus grants are "lump sum", meaning you can freely redistribute what you spend the money on after you get the grant.

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After you get the grant, you can use it as a bargaining chip to negotiate a professorship as you can move the grant to a different university.

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You do not need to be a PI already to apply, this is the most major opportunity for postdocs to start their own group in Europe. You just need to find a university that would host you (which is not hard, everyone loves to have ERC grantees).

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Alexander Schuckert @schuckert.org · 04/07/2026

To all US colleagues: the ERC has doubled the amount of additional funding researchers relocating from outside Europe. These grants can fund ~10 4-year PhD students and often lead to national "add-on" grants. New also: the 7 M Euro, 7 year "Plus" grant for exceptional visionaries. More 👇

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Let me ask you this: do professors stop thinking when they leave most of the writing of scientific papers to grad students/postdocs and focus on supervision, idea creation and problem solving?

Alexander Schuckert @schuckert.org · 03/07/2026

Very interesting, this reminds me of the discussions I‘m having with a friend who‘s in the „milk is poison“ camp. The evidence seems lukewarm at best…I hope medicine (and food science in particular) will start to adopt more the longing for finding causation rather than just correlation.

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Alexander Schuckert @schuckert.org · 03/07/2026

Isn’t this a bit like saying „Calculus is math“? Not sure anyone is sad about not having to calculate logarithms by hand any more.

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Alexander Schuckert @schuckert.org · 03/07/2026

Unfortunately, in many parts of German admin, you still need a wet signature (yes, digital doesn't count).

Alexander Schuckert @schuckert.org · 01/07/2026

Things that didn't need a study to know they're true...

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Alexander Schuckert @schuckert.org · 14/06/2026

This is amazing! Unfortunately a necessary skill of the future quantum workforce is to distinguish hype from science.

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Alexander Schuckert @schuckert.org · 04/06/2026

Right. From that perspective it is a more balanced article, but way to go IMHO. See this thread by one of the quoted scientists: bsky.app/profile/henr...

Alexander Schuckert @schuckert.org · 03/06/2026

The question here is really how one reports a dishonest player. If one uses the same language as for an honest player (who is maybe hyping results a little much), boundaries get blurred. Researchers don't "continue to be sceptical" - the whole QC community emphatically rejects Microsoft's claims.

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Alexander Schuckert @schuckert.org · 03/06/2026

What is the scientific breakthrough that requires to be reported on? Even then, journalistically one could opt for saying that Microsoft is yet again displaying bad scientific practice in the headline, while quoting their claims as a sub-message of the article rather than the other way around.

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Alexander Schuckert @schuckert.org · 03/06/2026

I disagree. The sycophancy towards big-tech is outrageous. Why quote them in the subtitle if they are clearly lying? Using phrases like "But some researchers question.." makes it sound like there is controversy. There is not. Every single serious scientist agrees this is total bullshit.

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Alexander Schuckert @schuckert.org · 31/05/2026

A society-changing idea can be a single sentence. I don’t think there is anything wrong with asking a student to flesh that idea out. In any case, co-authors on papers can contribute very different things, and can be crucial without having written a single word.

Alexander Schuckert @schuckert.org · 29/05/2026

So you're saying every word of papers with your name on was written by you?

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Alexander Schuckert @schuckert.org · 29/05/2026

Do you let your PhD students write for you? If yes, what's the difference?