Catherine McGeoch

Catherine McGeoch is a prominent inventor from Amherst, Massachusetts, with an impressive portfolio of three patents to her name. Most recently, she has been involved in the development of systems and devices capable of sampling from available probability distributions. This in turn can be used to create desirable probability distributions that are utilized in computational techniques like Importance Sampling and Markov chain Monte Carlo systems.

One interesting aspect of McGeoch's work in this area is her use of an analog processor as a sample generator. By programming the analog processor with a configuration of programmable parameters, it's possible to create a probability distribution over qubits of the analog processor. The analog processor can then be run, and the resulting qubits states used to generate a sample from the desired probability distribution. The operation of the sampling device can be further summarized as updating a set of samples with the new sample from the probability distribution and returning the set of samples.

McGeoch has also been involved in the development of computational systems designed for problem solving, with applications in quantum computing, among others. The system is capable of implementing heuristic-solving methods or optimizers, which may iteratively evaluate the results of processing and modify the problems or their representations before repeating the processing with the modified problem until the system reaches a termination condition.

Heuristic solvers or optimizers in the system may run on one or more digital processors and/or one or more quantum processors. The system is also able to autonomously select between different types of hardware devices and optimization algorithms, based on pre-processing assessments of the problem, including predicted success and features extracted from the problem. Additionally, the system can coordinate post-processing operations with processing operations, perhaps performing post-processing on a batch of samples while generating the next batch at the same time, making for a more efficient overall system.

Catherine McGeoch's extraordinary work has been done in the context of D-Wave Systems Inc. The esteemed inventor has worked alongside co-workers such as Firas Hamze and Evgeny Andriyash at the company. D-Wave Systems Inc. is a quantum computing company that specializes in building hardware and software for quantum computing applications. With McGeoch's contributions to the company, it is no wonder that D-Wave Systems Inc. is a successful leader in the field of quantum computing.