(My last name is "de Wolf", alphabetically ordered at `W'. It's not "Wolf", "De Wolf", "DeWolf", "deWolf", "Dewolf", "D. Wolf", "de Wolff", "deWolfe", "deWoolf", "d'Wolf", "de Wlof", "the Wolf")
(Pronounced as "duh Wolf", with a short `o' as in `on'; not "dee Woolf")
Address CWI
Visiting address: Science Park 123, 1098 XG Amsterdam
Postal address: P.O. Box 94079, 1090 GB Amsterdam
The Netherlands
Office L234 (2nd floor of the new wing of the CWI building)
Telephone 020-5924078 (+31 20 5924078)
E-mail rdewolf at cwidotnl
I do not have any open PhD or postdoc positions at the moment, so please don't email me to ask. Open positions of others at QuSoft are listed here.
Foreign students: I don't supervise summer internships unless they are by PhD students who are exceptionally well in tune with my research (which is theoretical computer science with focus on quantum algorithms and complexity; it's not physics, not cryptography, not data science, not web-design etc.), so please don't send me your generic internship applications.
I am a researcher and group leader at the Algorithms and Complexity group of CWI
(Dutch Centre for Mathematics and Computer Science) and part-time full professor at the ILLC of the University of Amsterdam. I'm also a member of QuSoft and part of the Amsterdam TCS ecosystem.
A long time ago I was a PhD student at CWI and ILLC, and then a postdoc at UC
Berkeley.
My main scientific interests are quantum computing and complexity theory, though I have also dabbled in error-correcting codes, data structures, operations research, and theoretical machine learning.
Courses
that I have taught or otherwise have been involved in.
Current PhD students: Lynn Engelberts.
Former PhD students: Giannicola Scarpa (graduated 2013, now an Associate Professor at Universidad Politécnica de Madrid), Srinivasan Arunachalam (graduated 2018, first a postdoc at MIT, now working at IBM Research), András Gilyén (graduated 2019, then a postdoc at Caltech, now at Rényi Institute of Mathematics, Budapest), Sander Gribling (graduated 2019, then a postdoc at IRIF, Paris, now an Assistant Professor at Tilburg University; supervised together with Monique Laurent),
Jouke Witteveen (graduated 2020; supervised together with Leen Torenvliet),
Joran van Apeldoorn (graduated 2020, then a postdoc at University of Amsterdam; supervised together with Monique Laurent), Yanlin Chen (graduated 2024, now a postdoc at CWI, soon to be a postdoc at UMD).
Some things that I recently was (co-)organizing or otherwise was part of:
TCS Amsterdam, the informatics advisory board of the Lorentz Center in Leiden, the Board of Examiners of the ILLC.
A. Ambainis and R. de Wolf.
Average-Case Quantum Query Complexity.
In 17th Annual Symposium on Theoretical Aspects of Computer Science (STACS 00), LNCS 1770, pp.133-144.
quant-ph/9904079 Journal
version in Journal of Physics A: Mathematical and General,
Special Issue on Quantum Information and Computation, 34(35):6741-6754,
2001.
H. Buhrman, I. Newman, H. Röhrig, and R. de Wolf.
Robust
Quantum Algorithms and Polynomials.
In 22nd Annual Symposium on Theoretical Aspects of Computer Science
(STACS 05), LNCS 3404, pp.593-604.
quant-ph/0309220 Journal
version in Theory of Computing Systems, 40(4):379-395,
2007 (special issue on STACS 05).
J. Kaniewski, T. Lee, and R. de Wolf.
Query complexity in expectation.
In 42nd International Colloquium on Automata, Languages and Programming (ICALP 15), LNCS 9134, pp.761-772.
arXiv/1411.7280.
S. Arunachalam, S. Chakraborty, T. Lee, M. Paraashar, and R. de Wolf.
Two new results about quantum exact learning.
In 46th International Colloquium on Automata, Languages and Programming (ICALP 19), Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs) volume 132, pp.16:1-16:15, 2019.
Journal version in Quantum 5, 587, 2021.
arXiv:1810.00481
S. Arunachalam, A. Belovs, A. Childs, R. Kothari, A. Rosmanis, and R. de Wolf.
Quantum Coupon Collector.
In 15th Conference on the Theory of Quantum Computation, Communication and Cryptography (TQC 20), Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs) volume 158, pp.10:1-10:17, 2020.
arXiv:2002.07688
A. Izdebski and R. de Wolf.
Improved Quantum Boosting.
In 31st European Symposium on Algorithms (ESA 23), Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs) volume 274, pp.64:1-64:16, 2023.
arXiv:2009.08360
J. van Apeldoorn, S. Gribling, Y. Li, H. Nieuwboer, M. Walter, and R. de Wolf.
Quantum algorithms for matrix scaling and matrix balancing.
In 48th International Colloquium on Automata, Languages and Programming (ICALP 21), Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs) volume 198, pp.110:1-17, 2021.
arXiv:2011.12823
A. Ambainis, M. Mosca, A. Tapp, and R. de Wolf.
Private
Quantum Channels.
In 41st IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS 00),
pp.547-553. quant-ph/0003101
S.H. Nienhuys-Cheng and R. de Wolf. Foundations of
Inductive Logic Programming, Lecture Notes in Artificial
Intelligence 1228, Springer, May 1997 (amazon.com
link). This is a very theoretical book on ILP. The first part gives
a self-contained introduction to the theory of resolution-based theorem
proving and logic programming, the second part in-depth covers most of
the topics in ILP that we considered of foundational
importance for the field. Writing this book took us about two and a
half years of sweat and struggle, but I'm still quite happy with the
final result (except for a serious error in the appendix to Chapter 18,
which was pointed out to us by Chandra Reddy). Krzysztof Apt kindly wrote
the foreword to our book, and also put it as review 97-6 on a
page
of positive reviews.
S.H. Nienhuys-Cheng and R. de Wolf.
A
Complete
Method for Program Specialization Based on Unfolding.
In 12th European Conference on Artificial
Intelligence (ECAI 96), pp.438-442, Wiley.
As I'm having some trouble compiling this file into pdf, you may
download the LaTeX-source of the paper instead.
S.H. Nienhuys-Cheng and R. de Wolf.
Least
Generalizations under Implication.
In 6th Workshop on Inductive Logic
Programming (ILP 96), LNAI 1314, pp.285-298, 1997.
R. de Wolf.
Book review of:
C.P. Williams and S.H. Clearwater, Explorations in Quantum
Computing, Springer, 1998.
In Science of Computer Programming, 32:213-216, 1998.
R. de Wolf.
Book review of
three quantum books by Pittenger, Hirvensalo, and Kitaev-Shen-Vyalyi.
In Quantum Information and Computation, 3(1):93-96, 2003.
Philosophical
applications of computational learning theory,
my Master's thesis in philosophy.
The first part gives a formal "proof" of Chomsky's ideas about the
necessity of an innate universal grammar. The second part is about
proofs of Occam's razor, which states that you should always select the
simplest hypothesis consistent with given data.
The thesis also contains a lot of historical and philosophical
background concerning these two topics.
