Finn Voichick

Personal Life

Hyattsville, MD

I was born in 1998 in Berkeley, CA, and I grew up in Madison, WI. I now live in Hyattsville, MD (in the DC area) with my wife (Abby), our daughter (Stella Jo), our dog (Chance), and two cats (Spookie and Ferris). Abby teaches preschool French at Spring Bilingual Montessori Academy, and I hope to one day be a college professor. In my free time, I enjoy playing with Stella and reading science fiction.

Preferred pronouns

he · him · his

Cognac

Circuit Optimization via Gradients and Noise-Aware Compilation

I am developing a quantum circuit optimizer that draws inspiration from quantum pulse engineering techniques.

Preprint

Qunity

A Unified Language for Quantum and Classical Computing

I created a quantum programming language designed around interoperability between quantum and classical computing. After I published this work, a CalTech undergrad developed a working implementation and compiler for this language.

Popl paper Extended version Implementation Qpl presentation

(Unfortunately, most of the presentation's audio was not recorded.)

University of Maryland

Computer Science

Since fall 2020, I've been a computer science PhD student at Umd, working in the Plum Lab to develop and study quantum programming languages. I like the computational model studied in the field of quantum computing and the mathematics behind it, and I'm interested to see what kinds of quantum algorithms the future scientists and engineers will enable. I hope to help make quantum computing more accessible by developing language features that are expressive, simple, and easy to reason about, using the Coq proof assistant to formally verify facts about programming languages.

Planqc 2021 Plum Lab Contact me

Api Learning

Washington University in St. Louis

At WashU, I worked with Caitlin Kelleher in the field of hci to develop and validate a model of api learning. This involved building a logging system, designing a study with human subjects, and building an interface for manually labelling logged data. Our Vl/Hcc 2020 paper won the Best Research Paper award.

Vl/Hcc 2020 Vl/Hcc 2019 Caitlin Kelleher

Education

Washington University in St. Louis

I graduated from WashU's School of Engineering in 2020 with two degrees:

• A BS in computer science with a second major in mathematics and a minor in philosophy-neuroscience-psychology.
• An MS in computer science with a certificate in data mining and machine learning.

Master's Thesis

Haah's Algorithm

University of Maryland

In the summer of 2019, I interned as a research assistant in Umd's Reu-Caar program. I was in the Joint Center for Quantum Information and Computer Science, working with Andrew Childs to implement, visualize, and improve Haah's algorithm for quantum signal processing decomposition.

Andrew Childs Haah's Algorithm

Teaching

Washington University in St. Louis

Throughout my undergraduate career at WashU, I served as a teaching assistant in several courses. I was head teaching assistant for two classes:

• Cse 231s Introduction to Parallel and Concurrent Programming, taught by Dennis Cosgrove.
• Cse 468t Introduction to Quantum Computing, taught by Ron Cytron.

My ta duties included course organization, assignment design, and substitute lecturing.

Cse 231s Dennis Cosgrove Cse 468t Ron Cytron

Api Usability

Carnegie Mellon University

In the summer of 2018, I interned as a research assistant in Cmu's Reuse program. I was in the Human–Computer Interaction Institute, working with Brad Myers to study api usability, specifically in the context of cloud computing apis. I focused on the discoverability of api elements and the involvement of mental models in api design, leading to the publication of one research paper and one poster.

Vl/Hcc 2019 Chi 2019 Brad Myers

Outreach

Studio: Tesla

Throughout my time at WashU, I volunteered with Studio Tesla, a student-run organization that sets up after-school stem clubs in middle schools in the St. Louis area. I was on the executive board as head of the Enrichment team, meaning that I was in charge of our curriculum development.

Website

BitBrawl

Programming Competition

I led the development of BitBrawl, an ai programming competition for high school and college students. This competition ran from May to September 2018.

Robotics

BadgerBots Frc Team 1306

In high school, I was head of programming for my robotics team, BadgerBots Frc Team 1306. In my senior year, our robot (named Nautilus) made it to semifinals in our division at the world championship. Our code (for which I was the lead developer) featured automatic targeting through computer vision and is open source.

Video Source Code