Events
MIC events are open to all members. We run workshops on quantum and classical ML tools, host visiting researchers for public lectures, and meet weekly for structured paper discussions.
Calendar
Register early — workshops and guest lectures have limited capacity.
This session continues our series on quantum advantage in machine learning. We will closely examine Tang's dequantization results for quantum-inspired recommendation systems and their implications for the quantum PCA speedup claim. Members are expected to have…
Dr. Chiara Bonfiglioli — Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics
We are pleased to welcome Dr. Chiara Bonfiglioli (Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics) for a public lecture on the current state of quantum advantage claims in the NISQ era. Dr. Bonfiglioli will review recent supremacy experiments, discuss noise thresh…
A practical three-hour workshop for members with little to no quantum programming experience. Participants will install and configure Qiskit, build their first quantum circuits, implement a variational quantum eigensolver (VQE) from scratch, and run experiment…
A focused afternoon working session for members contributing to the club's open-source QML Benchmarking Suite. We will tackle open GitHub issues, build out the dataset integration layer, and write documentation. New contributors welcome — no prior experience w…
This intermediate-level workshop covers variational quantum algorithms using the PennyLane framework. Topics include: gradient computation via the parameter-shift rule, integration with PyTorch and JAX, circuit optimization with Catalyst, and hybrid training l…
Event Types
Weekly 90-minute paper discussions. One member leads; everyone participates. We rotate leadership and assign pre-reading. Sessions are recorded when possible.
Hands-on technical sessions with prepared notebooks or exercises. Topics range from PennyLane circuit design to PyTorch training loops. Bring your laptop.
Public talks by external researchers or faculty. Typically 60 minutes followed by Q&A. All UofT students are welcome, not just MIC members.
Focused work sprints on specific MIC projects. Open GitHub issues are addressed in real time. Mentors present throughout. Great entry point for new contributors.
Shorter internal presentations by MIC members sharing research updates, literature reviews, or project progress. Followed by structured feedback from peers.
Informal community gatherings. Board game nights, department tour visits, and end-of-semester celebrations. No agenda — just people who like hard problems.
Archive
Slides and recordings are linked where available.
Our largest event of 2025, the MIC Fall Hackathon brought together 48 participants in 12 teams to tackle quantum-classical ML challenges over 12 hours. Teams worked on problems spanning drug-target interaction prediction with quantum kernels, hybrid optimizati…
Prof. Marcus Webb — Department of Physics, University of Toronto
Prof. Marcus Webb (Department of Physics, UofT) delivered an accessible lecture on surface codes, logical qubit thresholds, and the path from NISQ to fault-tolerant quantum computing. Special emphasis was placed on which error correction milestones would be re…
A hands-on workshop covering research-grade PyTorch practices: custom datasets and dataloaders, experiment tracking with Weights & Biases, reproducible training loops, profiling and optimization, and structuring research codebases for submission readiness. Ove…
The September reading group focused on Havlíček et al. (2019), "Supervised learning with quantum-enhanced feature spaces," and subsequent work on quantum kernel trainability. Discussion centered on when quantum kernels can be expected to outperform classical r…
We welcome proposals for guest lectures, workshops, and collaborative sessions from faculty, students, and external researchers.