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IBM and The Grainger College of Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign plan to launch a large-scale collaboration designed to increase access to technology education and skill development, and to combine the strengths of academia and the industrial sector to spur breakthroughs in emerging areas of technology. Specifically, the planned collaboration will focus on the rapidly growing areas of hybrid cloud and AI, quantum information science and technology, accelerated materials discovery, and sustainability to accelerate the discovery of solutions to complex global challenges.

This planned collaboration will be centered in the creation of the new IBM-Illinois Discovery Accelerator Institute, housed within The Grainger College of Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). It will be funded by a ten-year planned research investment from IBM and UIUC, complemented by a major new building project which will house research activities in quantum information, high-performance computing, hybrid cloud and networked environments with support from the State of Illinois, bringing total investments to more than $200 million. The newly planned Discovery Accelerator Institute will feature deep collaborations to develop communities of discovery across IBM, Grainger Engineering and the UIUC campus; research funding for UIUC in hybrid cloud, quantum information, materials, and sustainability; hiring of additional faculty and talent at UIUC; and a new facility for research in computing and quantum technologies at UIUC.

The IBM-University of Illinois collaboration is a tremendous development for our state and a testament to Illinois leadership as a hub of quantum research and artificial intelligence development, said Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker. This IBM investment will not only lift up a world class educational institution, but also will invite national and international scientists, entrepreneurs, businesses, and innovators to Illinois. Our state has made nation-leading commitments by investing $200 million to support groundbreaking work at the Chicago Quantum Exchange, as well as $500 million for the Discovery Partners Institute and the Illinois Innovation Network. Following that, the federal government awarded our state more than $200 million in grants for two National Quantum Information Science Research Centers, along with two National Science Foundation artificial intelligence grants. The IBM Institute cements The Grainger College of Engineering and the entire University of Illinois system at the forefront of technological advancements in quantum computing, AI, and hybrid cloud, and it sets our state up to become a serious technology industry leader on the international stage. I am thrilled to welcome IBM to Illinois.

The planned Institute will emphasize initiatives to increase access to STEM education and high-tech workforce development, as well as expand the collective research capacity of IBM and UIUC by tapping into the intellectual talent of students, faculty and industry researchers campus-wide. Together, these teams will tackle the urgent complex challenges faced by industry and academia, including the need for a more secure and flexible artificial intelligence-driven global cloud infrastructure, advancing the frontiers of quantum computing and technologies, applying technology to the discovery and creation of new materials, and engineering solutions for sustainability and the environment.

When launched, the Discovery Accelerator Institute will serve as a leading model for collaboration between the private sector and academia. It will facilitate connected and interactive research, weaving together the strong scientific foundation of an academic institution and the real-world translational expertise of a large industrial research organization.

In the planned Discovery Accelerator Institute, IBM Research teams and University of Illinois faculty and students will work side-by-side on projects to accelerate:

I couldnt be more excited about the new model of partnership we are building with the University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign, said Arvind Krishna, CEO of IBM. The Discovery Accelerator Institute will help drive innovations in hybrid cloud, AI and quantum computing, which are critical for the future of business and society. Were bringing together some of the brightest minds across both the industry and academia. Im eager to see the groundbreaking research and solutions the teams will pioneer from the discovery of new materials to carbon capture.

This institute with IBM is a pioneering new model of how we can build academic and researcher collaboration into technology and innovation at unmatched excellence and scale, said Robert J. Jones, chancellor of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. What excites us the most is imagining the exponentially expanded possibilities in these new emerging fields that will define the 21st century.

In addition to advancing technology research, the Discovery Accelerator Institute, IBM and UIUC will aim to drive job creation, industrial sector growth and new economic growth for the State of Illinois. The Institute aligns with the goals of the Illinois Innovation Network, including the Discovery Partners Institute of the UI System, and the mission of P33, to further seed and expand workforce development and diversity for future science and information technology opportunities across the state. Additionally, IBM and the U of I intend to fuel and broaden a more diverse talent and leadership pipeline for the growing hybrid cloud, AI, quantum information, materials discovery, and sustainability ecosystems.

This new collaboration builds on the foundational success of the IBM-Illinois Center for Cognitive Computing Systems Research (C3SR) since 2016. Building on that success, new collaborations between IBM researchers and Illinois faculty will allow for faster translation of bleeding-edge innovation to society, said Rashid Bashir, dean of The Grainger College of Engineering. We are thrilled to be enhancing our shared vision of advancing hybrid cloud, quantum, materials, sustainability and the future of discovery itself with IBM.

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IBM and the University of Illinois Plan to Launch New Discovery Accelerator Institute Homeland Security Today - HSToday

The pandemic had hit the world hard and many businesses collapsed. However, the crisis enabled rapid technology adoption and accelerated digital transformation across the industries. Companies started leveraging disruptive technologies to deliver value to customers and enhance business growth and productivity. With consumers largely shifting to online platforms and due to the pandemic-induced restrictions, businesses started building a digital presence to cater to their audience. With technology being integrated everywhere and considering the changing business landscape, digital transformation has a lot to offer this year. Let us look at the top 10 trends that will shape the digital transformation journey of businesses in 2021.

In the current scenario, digital is normal and businesses are striving to manage operations from homes and remote spaces. 5G had already been hailed much during last year and from this year onwards this technology will gain more prominence. 5G network can provide unprecedented speed and connectivity that can cater to the growing demand for increased bandwidth and reliable connectivity. 5G going mainstream will enable better IoT connectivity, enhance user experience and digital collaboration, and accelerate digital transformation.

With rapid technology adoption last year, blockchain has been brought to the limelight. Although it earlier resonated with cryptocurrency, blockchain is now adopted in different industries, especially in financial institutions. Blockchains capabilities are being explored and recently India appointed a panel that is said to focus on the exploration and expansion of blockchain technology in different industries. In the coming years, blockchain will play a crucial role in cybersecurity and will mature with increased adoption in industries.

The pandemic that surfaced last year made cybersecurity more relevant as there were many and continuous attacks on several companies in a short time. Since most of the companies switched to remote working, there arose a need for better and vigilant security measures. Robust cybersecurity practices are one of the top priorities of businesses going through digital transformation and planning to adopt it. The speed of digital transformation must be on par with a companys security strategies and infrastructure.

The finance and banking sector were some of the most impacted industries with rapid digitalization. Most of these services went online and initiated digital payments, digital credit application processes, online loan applications, etc. They are on a move to enhance the digital user experience through efficient digital transformation. Coming years will see a rise in digital banking and open banking initiatives. Digital payments services and digital banking will reshape the transformation in the financial sector.

Data is the fuel in todays customer-centric business models. However, gathering and managing data can be quite difficult without good infrastructure. Customer Data Platforms or CDPs step in here. CDPs collect data from all sources, organize, tag, and make them usable. There is an abundance of data available today and businesses often end up not utilizing them to maximum benefit. Data analytics has also become a potential ingredient to enhance growth and efficiency. Considering these factors, CDPs will empower and revolutionize digital transformation.

While businesses are actively migrating to the cloud, it is imperative to note the growth of a multi-cloud system. It will remove common barriers providers face and also eliminate vendor lock-ins. Multi-cloud and hybrid cloud systems will flourish this year and beyond and will shape the transformation of businesses. Multi-cloud enables the user to distribute cloud computing assets, software, and applications across different cloud platforms. They can also use several public and private cloud infrastructures.

Recently, Google announced that it will develop a commercial-grade error-free quantum computer within a decade. Although quantum computing has not been commercialized fully yet, it has become a vital research subject. Many industries will explore quantum computing in the coming years to enhance digital transformation.

Everything as a Service or XaaS has already gained importance in the business ecosystem. It is a generalized term for cloud service delivery models and it recognizes all the different products and services across the internet. It can simplify technology deployments and as the services will have quick access, it can be widely employed by companies. The XaaS model can enhance agility and help businesses in streamlining digital transformation.

Since the pandemic, offices have been working from home and in remote conditions. Several surveys and studies suggest that this remote work strategy is to stay here for long. Companies have identified the potential benefit of working remotely and this has also led to accelerating digital transformation. There will be more innovations and smart technologies to cater to the needs of the work from home population.

Automation can increase the pace of digital transformation and businesses will largely focus on automating the processes and ERP in years ahead. During the pandemic, several companies had to adopt automation to remain in the market. Thus, automation has become the core of digital transformation. With AI, machine learning, and robotics being integrated into businesses, it will be possible to automate the Enterprise Resource Planning model to enable better growth and agility.

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Top 10 Trends Influencing Digital Transformation in 2021 - Analytics Insight

Google is aiming to build a useful, error-corrected quantum computer by the end of the decade, the company explained in a blog post. The search giant hopes the technology will help solve a range of big problems like feeding the world and climate change to developing better medicines. To develop the technology, Google has unveiled a new Quantum AI campus in Santa Barbara containing a quantum data center, hardware research labs, and quantum processor chip fabrication facilities. It will spend billions developing the technology over the next decade, The Wall Street Journal reports.

The target announced at Google I/O on Tuesday comes a year and a half after Google said it had achieved quantum supremacy, a milestone where a quantum computer has performed a calculation that would be impossible on a traditional classical computer. Google says its quantum computer was able to perform a calculation in 200 seconds that would have taken 10,000 years or more on a traditional supercomputer. But competitors racing to build quantum computers of their own cast doubt on Googles claimed progress. Rather than taking 10,000 years, IBM argued at the time that a traditional supercomputer could actually perform the task in 2.5 days or less.

This extra processing power could be useful to simulate molecules, and hence nature, accurately, Google says. This might help us design better batteries, creating more carbon-efficient fertilizer, or develop more targeted medicines, because a quantum computer could run simulations before a company invests in building real-world prototypes. Google also expects quantum computing to have big benefits for AI development.

Despite claiming to have hit the quantum supremacy milestone, Google says it has a long way to go before such computers are useful. While current quantum computers are made up of less than 100 qubits, Google is targeting machine built with 1,000,000. Getting there is a multistage process. Google says it first needs to cut down on the errors qubits make, before it can think about building 1,000 physical qubits together into a single logical qubit. This will lay the groundwork for the quantum transistor, a building block of future quantum computers.

Despite the challenges ahead, Google is optimistic about its chances. We are at this inflection point, the scientist in charge of Googles Quantum AI program, Hartmut Neven, told the Wall Street Journal, We now have the important components in hand that make us confident. We know how to execute the road map. Googles eventually plans to offer quantum computing services over the cloud.

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Google wants to build a useful quantum computer by 2029 - The Verge

circa 1931: German-born physicist Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955) standing beside a blackboard with ... [+] chalk-marked mathematical calculations written across it. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

40 years ago, Nobel Prize-winner Richard Feynman argued that nature isn't classical, dammit, and if you want to make a simulation of nature, you'd better make it quantum mechanical. This was later perceived as a rallying cry for developing a quantum computer, leading to todays rapid progress in the search for quantum supremacy. Heres a very short history of the evolution of quantum computing.

1905Albert Einstein explains the photoelectric effectshining light on certain materials can function to release electrons from the materialand suggests that light itself consists of individual quantum particles or photons.

1924The term quantum mechanics is first used in a paper by Max Born

1925Werner Heisenberg, Max Born, and Pascual Jordan formulate matrix mechanics, the first conceptually autonomous and logically consistent formulation of quantum mechanics

1925 to 1927Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg develop the Copenhagen interpretation, one of the earliest interpretations of quantum mechanics which remains one of the most commonly taught

1930Paul Dirac publishes The Principles of Quantum Mechanics, a textbook that has become a standard reference book that is still used today

1935Albert Einstein, Boris Podolsky, and Nathan Rosen publish a paper highlighting the counterintuitive nature of quantum superpositions and arguing that the description of physical reality provided by quantum mechanics is incomplete

1935Erwin Schrdinger, discussing quantum superposition with Albert Einstein and critiquing the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, develops a thought experiment in which a cat (forever known as Schrdingers cat) is simultaneously dead and alive; Schrdinger also coins the term quantum entanglement

1947Albert Einstein refers for the first time to quantum entanglement as spooky action at a distance in a letter to Max Born

1976Roman Stanisaw Ingarden of the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toru, Poland, publishes one of the first attempts at creating a quantum information theory

1980Paul Benioff of the Argonne National Laboratory publishes a paper describing a quantum mechanical model of a Turing machine or a classical computer, the first to demonstrate the possibility of quantum computing

1981In a keynote speech titled Simulating Physics with Computers, Richard Feynman of the California Institute of Technology argues that a quantum computer had the potential to simulate physical phenomena that a classical computer could not simulate

1985David Deutsch of the University of Oxford formulates a description for a quantum Turing machine

1992The DeutschJozsa algorithm is one of the first examples of a quantum algorithm that is exponentially faster than any possible deterministic classical algorithm

1993The first paper describing the idea of quantum teleportation is published

1994Peter Shor of Bell Laboratories develops a quantum algorithm for factoring integers that has the potential to decrypt RSA-encrypted communications, a widely-used method for securing data transmissions

1994The National Institute of Standards and Technology organizes the first US government-sponsored conference on quantum computing

1996Lov Grover of Bell Laboratories invents the quantum database search algorithm

1998First demonstration of quantum error correction; first proof that a certain subclass of quantum computations can be efficiently emulated with classical computers

1999Yasunobu Nakamura of the University of Tokyo and Jaw-Shen Tsai of Tokyo University of Science demonstrate that a superconducting circuit can be used as a qubit

2002The first version of the Quantum Computation Roadmap, a living document involving key quantum computing researchers, is published

2004First five-photon entanglement demonstrated by Jian-Wei Pan's group at the University of Science and Technology in China

2011The first commercially available quantum computer is offered by D-Wave Systems

2012 1QB Information Technologies (1QBit), the first dedicated quantum computing software company, is founded

2014Physicists at the Kavli Institute of Nanoscience at the Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands, teleport information between two quantum bits separated by about 10 feet with zero percent error rate

2017 Chinese researchers report the first quantum teleportation of independent single-photon qubits from a ground observatory to a low Earth orbit satellite with a distance of up to 1400 km

2018The National Quantum Initiative Act is signed into law by President Donald Trump, establishing the goals and priorities for a 10-year plan to accelerate the development of quantum information science and technology applications in the United States

2019Google claims to have reached quantum supremacy by performing a series of operations in 200 seconds that would take a supercomputer about 10,000 years to complete; IBM responds by suggesting it could take 2.5 days instead of 10,000 years, highlighting techniques a supercomputer may use to maximize computing speed

The race for quantum supremacy is on, to being able to demonstrate a practical quantum device that can solve a problem that no classical computer can solve in any feasible amount of time. Speedand sustainabilityhas always been the measure of the jump to the next stage of computing.

In 1944, Richard Feynman, then a junior staff member at Los Alamos, organized a contest between human computers and the Los Alamos IBM facility, with both performing a calculation for the plutonium bomb. For two days, the human computers kept up with the machines. But on the third day, recalled an observer, the punched-card machine operation began to move decisively ahead, as the people performing the hand computing could not sustain their initial fast pace, while the machines did not tire and continued at their steady pace (seeWhen Computers Were Human, by David Alan Greer).

Nobel Prize winning physicist Richard Feynman stands in front of a blackboard strewn with notation ... [+] in his lab in Los Angeles, Californina. (Photo by Kevin Fleming/Corbis via Getty Images)

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27 Milestones In The History Of Quantum Computing - Forbes

20 May

Qutech and Intel jointly designed a qubit-controlling chip destined to solve the quantum computers wiring bottleneck. Currently, each qubit in a quantum computer is addressed individually, by a single wire. This stands in the way of a scalable quantum computer since millions of qubits would require millions of wires, explains lead investigator Lieven Vandersypen of Qutech. The solution: taking the control unit inside the cryogenic vessel, where the qubits reside.

Researchers and engineers from Qutech and Intel, therefore, designed a control chip that can withstand the extreme cold. Named Horse Ridge after the coldest place in Oregon, the CMOS IC is based on Intels 22nm low-power FinFET technology. As electronic devices operate very differently at cryogenic temperatures, we used special techniques in the chip design both to ensure the right chip operation and to drive the qubits with high accuracy, says co-lead investigator Edoardo Charbon.

Ultimately, the controller chip and the qubits can be integrated on the same die (as theyre all fabricated in silicon) or package, thus further relieving the wiring bottleneck.

To assess the quality of the Horse Ridge chip, it was compared to a classical room-temperature controller. It turns out the gate fidelity of the system is very high (99.7 percent) and limited not by the controller but by the qubits themselves. Next, the controllers programmability was showcased using the Deutsch-Jozsa quantum algorithm, which is one of the simplest algorithms thats much more efficient on a quantum computer than on a traditional computer. This demonstrated the ability to program the control chip with arbitrary sequences of operations and opens the way to on-chip implementation and a truly scalable quantum computer.

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Qutech and Intel cut the quantum computer's wires Bits&Chips - Bits&Chips