Hartmut Neven, born in 1964, is a scientist from Germany and the United States. He works in areas such as quantum computing, computer vision, robotics, and the study of how the brain processes information. He is best known for his work in recognizing faces and objects, as well as his contributions to quantum machine learning. Currently, he is the Vice President of Engineering at Google. There, he leads the Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab, which he started in 2012.
Education
Hartmut Neven studied Physics and Economics in Brazil, Cologne, Paris, Tübingen, and Jerusalem. He completed his Master's thesis on a neuronal model of object recognition at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, working with Valentino Braitenberg. In 1996, he earned his Ph.D. in Physics from the Institute for Neuroinformatics at Ruhr University in Bochum, Germany. His thesis was titled "Dynamics for vision-guided autonomous mobile robots" and was completed under the guidance of Christoph von der Malsburg. He received a scholarship from the Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes, which is Germany's most respected scholarship organization.
Work
In 1998, Neven became a research professor of computer science at the University of Southern California, working at the Laboratory for Biological and Computational Vision. In 2003, he returned to the University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute as the head of the Laboratory for Human-Machine Interfaces.
Neven co-founded two companies: Eyematic, where he served as Chief Technology Officer, and Neven Vision, which he initially led as Chief Executive Officer. At Eyematic, he developed face recognition technology and real-time facial feature analysis for avatar animation. Teams led by Neven repeatedly won top scores in government-sponsored tests that evaluated the most accurate face recognition software. Face filters, now commonly used on mobile phones, were first launched by Neven Vision on the networks of NTT DoCoMo and Vodafone Japan in 2003. Neven Vision also created mobile visual search for camera phones. In 2006, Neven Vision was acquired by Google.
At Google, Neven managed teams that worked to improve Google's visual search technologies. His team launched Google Goggles, now known as Google Lens. The idea of adversarial patterns began in his group when he asked Christian Szegedy to modify pixel inputs of a deep neural network to reduce the activity of specific output nodes. This project aimed to help with object localization but did not succeed. However, the idea led to the development of adversarial learning and DeepDream art. In 2013, his optical character recognition team won the ICDAR Robust Reading Competition by a large margin. In 2014, his object recognition team won the ImageNet challenge.
Neven was a co-founder of the Google Glass project. His team completed the first prototype, named Ant, in 2011.
In 2006, Neven began exploring the use of quantum computing to solve difficult combinatorial problems in machine learning. He worked with D-Wave Systems to create the first image recognition system using quantum algorithms. This system was demonstrated at SuperComputing07. At NIPS 2009, his team showed the first binary classifier trained on a quantum processor.
In 2012, Neven and Pete Worden at NASA Ames founded the Quantum Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. In 2014, he invited John M. Martinis and his team from UC Santa Barbara to join the lab to start a facility for building superconducting quantum processors. The Quantum Artificial Intelligence team performed the first experimental demonstration of a scalable simulation of a molecule.
In 2016, the team designed an experiment to test quantum supremacy. Quantum supremacy was officially announced by Google in October 2019.
In 2023, Quantum AI researchers showed that quantum error correction works in practice by proving that the error of a logical qubit decreases when more physical qubits are used to create it.
Google's quantum processors have been used to study complex quantum physics topics, such as time crystals, traversable wormholes, and non-Abelian anyons, which are difficult to create in laboratories.
Neven's law describes that the performance of quantum computers improves at a doubly exponential rate.