Massimo Equi

Short Bio

I obtained my master's degree in computer science in 2018 at University of Pisa, Italy, and my PhD in 2022 at the University of Helsinki, Finland. From September 2022 to August 2024 I held a postdoc position in the Quantum Algorithms and Software cross-group at University of Helsinki. I then joined the distributed algorithms group at Aalto University, Finland, as a postdoctoral researcher. My broad research interests focus on algorithms and complexity under different computational models. Starting with string algorithms, towards the end of my PhD I started exploring quantum computing, and later distributed computing. Nowadays, I focus on quantum computing, both in the centralized and distributed settings.

In the centralized quantum model (standard quantum RAM model), I deal with string problems on degenerate text and graphs, which have their main practical applications in bioinformatics, specifically in pangenomics. My main contribution here is to have shown that quantum algorithms can beat classical ones, breaking through classical conditional quadratic lower bounds.
Main references: paper 1 (preprint), paper 2 (preprint part 1, preprint part 2)

In the distributed setting, my main focus is on the LOCAL model, for which we showed a strong separation between the classical version (randomized LOCAL) and its quantum counterpart (quantum LOCAL). In particular, we found a problem that can be solved ina constant number of communication rounds in quantum LOCAL, but that requires a superconstant complexity in randomized LOCAL.
Main references: paper 1 (preprint), paper 2 (preprint)