Bilal A. Shaw

"What is that confers the noblest delight? What is that which swells a man's breast with pride above that which any other experience can bring to him? Discovery! To know that you are walking where none others have walked; that you are beholding what human eye has not seen before; that you are breathing a virgin atmosphere. To give birth to an idea -- to discover a great thought -- an intellectual nugget, right under the dust of a field that many a brain -- plow had gone over before. To find a new planet, to invent a new hinge, to find the way to make the lightnings carry your messages. To be the first -- that is the idea. To do something, say something, see something, before any body else -- these are the things that confer a pleasure compared with which other pleasures are tame and commonplace, other ecstasies cheap and trivial." (Mark Twain)

I currently work as a director of data science manager at Neustar.  I am excited to be working with a smart, highly motivated group of data scientists based in India and Los Angeles.  I work in the R&D department and lead a team that is prototyping the next generation of Neustar's identity platform.  I also lead a team of senior data scientists developing Neustar's fraud solutions.  We currently have a state-of-the-art fraud detection platform called Digital Identity Risk or DIR in production.  

In the past I have worked as a scientist in the Analytics department at ID Analytics in San Diego (B2B) and at Headspace in Santa Monica (B2C).  I've also worked at OpenX (B2B) in Pasadena in digital advertising.  

In August of 2010, I completed my doctoral degree in quantum information science from the computer science department at the University of Southern California under the supervision of Dr. Todd A. Brun. I have simulated quantum error-correcting codes under realistic physical noise models and analyzed their performance through various channels. Dr. Todd Brun and Dr. Ruediger Schack co-authored a software package to simulate quantum trajectory equations. I later extended the software to include quantum operations with density matrices and a routine that solves the full Lindbladian master equation. If you would like to use the software to simulate interesting quantum information processing tasks, please feel free to e-mail me. A copy of the QIP software can be found here. It is freely available under GNU General Public License.

I have worked on some aspects of information hiding using quantum information processing tools. Todd and I developed a general theory of quantum steganography and we also showed how one could hide quantum information the five-qubit code also sometimes known as the Perfect Code.  

I continue to immerse myself in quantum computing.  I find it incredible that when I joined the field as a graduate student there were just a handful research papers in the field and no one really knew how to build a fully scalable fault-tolerant quantum computer.  With start-ups like Rigetti Computing, Quantum Circuits and others, and with big companies like IBM, Google, and Microsoft backing research in viable quantum computers, the dawn of quantum supremacy is not too far in the future.  

During my undergraduate years and my Masters degree I worked in the Laboratory for Molecular Science with Dr. Leonard Adleman on self-assembly. 

I maintain a blog where in the past I have talked about my cultural and scientific escapades in Los Angeles.  You can read the blog here.

When I am not working on computer science I enjoy hiking, yoga, writing poetry, sketching, and going to as many live music events around San Diego and Los Angeles as time can permit.