Two CQT group leaders win support for “ground-breaking, high-risk research”

Meet the two new NRF Investigators at CQT: Divesh Aggarwal (left) and Mile Gu (right).

The National Research Foundation, Singapore (NRF) awards to a small cohort each year an Investigatorship that “provides opportunities for scientists and researchers to pursue ground-breaking, high-risk research.”

CQT Principal Investigator Divesh Aggarwal, an Associate Professor in the School of Computing at the National University of Singapore and CQT Fellow Mile Gu, an Associate Professor in the School of Physical and Mathematical Sciences at Nanyang Technological University are both recipients of the award in 2024. 

The NRF Investigatorship offers five years’ support for work on projects selected after competitive review. 

Crypto and AI 

Divesh, who has been a CQT PI since 2016, will deepen his work relevant to post-quantum cryptography — the design of cryptographic methods expected to be resistant to attack by quantum computing. His project title is “Computational Hardness of Lattice Problems and Implications”. Three out of four algorithms recommended in 2022 by the United States’ National Institute of Standards and Technology for post-quantum cryptography are lattice-based. 

“My project aims to bring down the gap between theory and practice to get more security,” says Divesh. 

Mile, a CQT Fellow since 2023 and earlier postdoc alumnus of the Centre, is a theorist interested in quantum computing and simulation. He has worked on understanding the roots of quantum speed-ups and the ability of quantum systems to model better complex time-series data  — such as financial data or correlations in natural language. His present project title is “Performing Complex Adaptive Tasks More Efficiently with Autonomous Quantum Agents,” with aims that will leverage such models to enhance artificial intelligence (AI). 

“I wish to understand fundamentally how AI works and where quantum physics fits into that picture,” says Mile.

The two CQT group leaders share more about themselves and their research in these short interviews: 

• Meet a CQTian: Divesh Aggarwal 
• Meet a CQTian: Mile Gu