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The Department of Homeland Securitys Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and Science and Technology Directorate are working closely together to focus on the application of emerging technologies in a symbiotic relationship to better respond to national security concerns.

Officials from both agencies spoke during a GovCon discussion Tuesday, illuminating the joint effort to test and deploy emerging technologies, including artificial intelligence, advanced sensors, and data modeling and simulation.

Emerging technologies are really coming into focus especiallywith CISA and working with S&T. The relationship I would say now, is, is extremely, extremely close, said Garfield Jones, the associate chief of strategic technology at CISA.

Jones further explained that more operational technologies and capabilities are arising from the research within the S&T. He highlighted the current demand for technologies ready to be incorporated into areas threatened by national security concerns, namely U.S. infrastructure.

Infrastructure is in the [CISA] name, he said. We focused on that infrastructure part, we focused on the threatto the infrastructure, to the nation. Were starting to take more of that, that advisory and risk-advisory role.

Working with S&T, CISA is gauging the emerging technologies potentially ready for use and developing policies to prepare for their advent.

In terms of use cases, optimization is one of the primary applications. Adam Cox, the director of S&Ts Strategy and Policy Office, said that all of the emerging tech applications are implementing existing systems, like UAVs, to improve their operations.

Fellow agencies that S&T has worked with to incorporate new technologies include the Departments of Defense, Treasury and Justice.

We've been really good at taking things that DOD has developed and adapting them to our needs, and figuring out how to apply them in a homeland security mission or a larger DOD offensive capability, Cox said.

He added that S&Ts research portfolio doesnt just service the government, but key operations like emergency response and public infrastructure.

We're developing technology for not just people within the department that are our departmental brother and sister agencies, but this larger community, this homeland security enterprisethat is looking for technology to keep officers safe, to protect the bridges and power stations and financial institutions, he said.

CISA still broadly oversees the cyber-specific applications of emerging technologies developed between both agencies. Jones added that malware and threat detection, as well as incorporating a user experience component, are two aspects that will inform how CISA tailors emerging tech systems into its mission suit.

Fellow panelist Donald Coulter, a senior cybersecurity advisor within DHS, added that the CISA partnership is looking to impact departmental cybersecurity operations related to data protection and open source software security.

We're doing great work and working with transitioning stuff and capabilities, not only to CISA and to our department partners, but also working with industry and community to transition to make things available to the broader community, Coulter said.

Buzzier emerging technologies, namely quantum encryption systems, are also on the research docket across the agency. Coulter said that despite quantum technologys ambiguous future, DHS is looking into fortifying the security architecture of classical computing networks ahead of a viable quantum computer.

We're looking at all angles of that challenge, he said. Amid the all-encompassing nature of post-quantum cryptographyincluding gauging risk, updating current encryption schemes, and identifying high-risk assetsDHS is also looking to capitalize on some promises of quantum information systems.

Coulter specified that quantum-enabled communications and computing architectures gives us an opportunity to really look at challenging problems from a different perspective and be able to develop solutions much more quickly, much more completely and robustly, allows us opportunities to change the way we communicate and give us opportunities to communicate more securely, resiliently, and identify when adversaries may be trying to eavesdrop.

Jones added that CISA is also working to help organizations protect their systems from powerful quantum algorithms that can break through standard encryption.

Once you've developed a cryptographically relevant quantum computer, which may be anywhere from five to 10 years out, there's [a] good possibility to really damage the encryption that we currently use today, he said. And so, we have to prepare for that possibility.

Continued here:
DHS S&T and CISA Forge Deep Partnership in Emerging Tech R&D - Nextgov

Illustration of open quantum systems and non-Hermitian topology. Credit: Jose Lado, Aalto University.

Scientists have discovered a method for predicting the behavior of many-body quantum systems coupled to their environment. This advancement is essential for safeguarding quantum data in quantum devices, paving the way for practical applications of quantum technology.

In a paper published in Physical Review Letters, a team of researchers from Aalto University in Finland and IAS Tsinghua University in China unveiled a novel approach for predicting the behavior of quantum systems, like particle groups, when connected to external environments. Typically, connecting a system like a quantum computer to its environment leads to decoherence and information leakage, compromising the data within the system. However, the researchers have devised a technique that transforms this issue into a beneficial solution.

The research was carried out by Aalto doctoral researcher Guangze Chen under the supervision of Professor Jose Lado and in collaboration with Fei Song from IAS Tsinghua. Their approach combines techniques from two domains, quantum many-body physics, and non-Hermitian quantum physics.

One of the most intriguing and powerful phenomena in quantum systems is many-body quantum correlations. Understanding these and predicting their behavior is vital because they underpin the exotic properties of key components of quantum computers and quantum sensors. While a lot of progress has been made in predicting quantum correlations when matter is isolated from its environment, doing so when matter is coupled to its environment has so far eluded scientists.

In the new study, the team showed that connecting a quantum device to an external system can be a strength in the right circumstances. When a quantum device is host to so-called non-Hermitian topology, it leads to robustly protected quantum excitations whose resilience stems from the very fact that they are open to the environment. These kinds of open quantum systems can potentially lead to disruptive new strategies for quantum technologies that harness external coupling to protect information from decoherence and leaks.

The study establishes a new theoretical method to calculate the correlations between quantum particles when they are coupled to their environment. The method we developed allows us to solve correlated quantum problems that present dissipation and quantum many-body interactions simultaneously. As a proof of concept, we demonstrated the methodology for systems with 24 interacting qubits featuring topological excitations, says Chen.

Professor Lado explains that their approach will help move quantum research from idealized conditions to real-world applications. Predicting the behavior of correlated quantum matter is one of the critical problems for the theoretical design of quantum materials and devices. However, the difficulty of this problem becomes much greater when considering realistic situations in which quantum systems are coupled to an external environment. Our results represent a step forward in solving this problem, providing a methodology for understanding and predicting both quantum materials and devices in realistic conditions in quantum technologies, he says.

Reference: Topological Spin Excitations in Non-Hermitian Spin Chains with a Generalized Kernel Polynomial Algorithm by Guangze Chen, Fei Song and Jose L. Lado, 7 March 2023, Physical Review Letters.DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.130.100401

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Quantum Breakthrough: New Method Protects Information From Decoherence and Leaks - SciTechDaily

In this episode of Brains, Black Holes, and Beyond, Senna Aldoubosh and Noelle Kim sit down with Josh Leeman, a graduate student in the Electrical and Computer Engineering department. Leeman discusses his interest in applying technologies from condensed matter theory to quantum computing applications, how doing research remotely during the pandemic gave him insight on his research interests, and valuable advice for students when making their future plans.

This episode of Brains, Black Holes, and Beyond (B Cubed) was produced under the 147th board of the Prince in partnership with the Insights newsletter.

For more information about the Schoop Lab and Joshs research, feel free to visit the pages linked below.

RESOURCES

https://schoop.princeton.edu/https://jleeman.com/

CREDITS

Written and Hosted by Senna Aldoubosh and Noelle Kim

Edited and Sound Engineered by Noelle Kim

Transcript by Noelle Kim

Produced by Senna Aldoubosh

For more from The Daily Princetonian, visit dailyprincetonian.com. For more from Princeton Insights, visit insights.princeton.edu. Please direct all corrections to corrections@dailyprincetonian.com.

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Material Design and Quantum Computing Applications w/ Grad ... - The Daily Princetonian

KINGSTON, R.I. April 14, 2023 On World Quantum Day, April 14, the University of Rhode Island community gathered to celebrate a new quantum computing initiative, aimed at positioning URI students and the Rhode Island workforce at the forefront of the next great computing revolution.

The initiative includes a new research partnership with IBM that will provide URI faculty and students with access to IBMs cutting-edge quantum computing systems. The initiative will bring new visiting faculty, postdoctoral researchers, and graduate students to URI in support of the Universitys masters degree and graduate certificate programs in quantum computing. Additional outreach and summer research opportunities for high school students will help to spark interest in the next generation of students.

The initiative is supported by a $1 million directed federal earmark secured by U.S. Sen. Jack Reed, as well as funding from the URI College of Arts and Sciences and the Graduate School of Oceanography.

As Rhode Islands flagship university, its incumbent upon us to be in a leadership position when it comes to the technologies that will shape the future of our state and nation, said URI President Marc Parlange. Through this initiative, were harnessing our faculty expertise in guiding the development of quantum technologies, while giving our students opportunities to hit the ground running with a technology that promises to reshape our world.

Quantum information science promises to be the next paradigm-shifting idea.It will enable unparalleled scientific advancement that paves the way for ground-breaking discoveries, said Senator Reed. I am proud to deliver $1 million for the new Quantum Computing Initiative here at Rhode Islands flagship public research university. This initiative will help establish URI as a hub for quantum information science in the Northeast, helping the university expand its teaching capacity, bringing in experts to expand the universitys quantum degree programs, and training the next generation of students and researchers.

Reed and Parlange helped to kick off a World Quantum Day symposium at URI featuring prominent speakers from the quantum computing world. Participants included URI alumni Christopher Savoie, co-founder and chief executive officer of Zapata Computing, and Adele Merritt, intelligence community chief information officer at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Savoie earned his bachelors degree from URI and serves on the College of Arts and Sciences Advisory Council. Merritt earned her Ph.D. from URI in mathematics.

Other speakers included Christopher Lirakis, lead for quantum systems deployment at IBM; Charles Robinson, quantum computing public sector leader at IBM; Kurt Jacobs, deputy chief scientist at the Army Research Laboratory; Pedro Lopes, business developer at the computing firm QuEra; and Juan Rivera, senior engineer at Dell Computing.

Partnering with IBM

Quantum computing, which takes advantage of the fundamental laws governing the behavior of individual elementary particles, promises to revolutionize the way information is processed. Todays computers process data by manipulating digital bitsunits of information represented by zeros and ones. Quantum computers use quantum bits, or qubits, which can exist in a state of being a zero and a one simultaneously. By holding information in multiple states at once, quantum computers can perform calculations that even todays largest supercomputers cant handle.

Quantum computers will be able to do calculations in minutes that would take classical computers centuries to perform, said Leonard Kahn, chair of the URI Department of Physics. Thats going to enable us to tackle problems that we simply cannot do today.

The technology remains in its infancy, however. There are only a limited number of working quantum computers in the world today, and scientists are working to scale these systems up. Giving URI students and faculty access to IBMs quantum systems will be a boon for student education and faculty research, Kahn says.

In 2021, URI launched a five-year program that graduates students with a bachelors degree in physics and a masters in quantum computing. This year, the University added an online graduate certificate program.

Our students are going to graduate having actually worked on a quantum computer, Kahn said. Thats not something many programs can say right now, and it gives our students a tremendous advantage.

First-hand access to quantum systems will also be useful for faculty like physics professors Vanita Srinivasa and Wenchao Ge, who are working on making quantum computers scalable and more robust. For other researchers on campus, this will be a chance to familiarize themselves with a technology that promises to revolutionize fields from business to environmental science.

This isnt just about computational speed, said Paula Bontempi, dean of the Graduate School of Oceanography. Its about having the ability to model complex systems like Narragansett Bay, or the North Atlantic Ocean. If we want to understand the impacts of climate change, we have to take in all of the observational data that we collect and do the calculations that allow us to predict what the future ocean looks like. Thats where quantum computing comes into play.

Access to the IBM system will also enable a new research partnership between URI and the Naval Undersea Warfare Center. That project will support research into the use of quantum systems in the operation of autonomous underwater vehicles.

Educating the quantum workforce

The initiative will also help URI to expand its research and teaching capacity. The University plans to add four new visiting faculty, four postdoctoral researchers and four graduate teaching assistants in the coming years. The new faculty and students will help manage the expansion of URIs quantum degree programs.

The expansion comes at a critical time, Kahn says.

The capacity of quantum computers is doubling roughly every six months, Kahn said. That means that students who are in high school now are likely to be graduating from college when quantum computers begin to have wider applicability. Now is the time to start educating the workforce that will be using this technology.

URI faculty will also work with a nonprofit group called Qubit by Qubit to provide outreach to high school students around Rhode Island. The outreach will include scholarships for high school students to participate in summer workshops and research internships with URI faculty on the Kingston Campus.

Jen Riley, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, said that the initiative helps to bolster both the research and educational missions of the college.

One of our goals in the College of Arts and Sciences is to prepare students not only for todays job market, but also for jobs that are sure to exist in the future, Riley said. This initiative is an example of how we do that. Were making sure our students already have experience with quantum systems the day they come online, and helps position URI as a leader in this emerging technology.

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URI announces new quantum computing initiative on World ... - University of Rhode Island

Quantum computing is a coming technology thats likely to revolutionize what we can do, and even what we can imagine doing with computers. And the keys to the power of quantum computing are qubits.

But what exactly are qubits, and how do they power the quantum computing revolution?

In classical computers, the units of encoding are bits the binary 0s and 1s with which were familiar. A collection of 8 bits can render you any single number between 0-255.

That in itself is pretty impressive, and its always been the way we measure computer encoding in the modern era, so weve grown up, generation after generation, understanding that it was the way things were done, even as speeds increased and processing power doubled and redoubled, as chips grew faster and more effective.

The cloud changed the way we thought about computing, particularly in storage space and speed, but even there, there has been no fundamental change in the way that data is encoded.

Strap in the next bit is necessarily complicated, because it brings quantum physics to the party of data encoding.

Quantum scientists study the world of the infinitesimally small particles of matter, and the forces that operate on them. The thing to understand about that is that in the world of very small objects, forces often work in very different ways than they do in the macro-universe of comparatively large objects the things we can see, feel, and touch in what we (bless our naivety) think of as the real world.

In the world of quantum physics, things get unexpectedly freaky. Objects at that scale behave in strange ways, and two of those ways are key to understanding qubits in quantum computing.

Quantum superposition is the kind of thing that makes no sense in the macro-universe. It occurs where a quantum element, whether its the spin of an electron or the orientation of a proton, can be in two quantum states simultaneously.

In quantum physics, for instance, an electron can be both a particle and a wave at the same time. In the macro-universe of course, that would normally be absurd a fact pointed out by quantum physicist Erwin Schrdinger when he invented the thought experiment known as Schrdingers Cat. Schrdingers Cat puts forward the idea that you put a cat in a sealed box with a flask of poison, a source of radioactivity and a Geiger counter. If a single atom in the radioactive source decays, the flask of poison shatters, and the cat dies. If theres no decay, no flask shatters, and the cat lives to claw your face off when you finally release it.

Until you open the box, the cat is theoretically both alive and dead simultaneously.

So far, so fun, so reportable to the ASPCA. But what does any of that have to do with qubits in quantum computing right?

Qubits are what are also known as quantum bits. Unless you want to learn about orthogonal x and y-basis states, lets say that qubits in quantum computing act like electrons in quantum physics, and can have multiple values at the same time.

Take a moment with that, were about to hit you with the second way in which qubits harness the principles of quantum physics.

Quantum entanglement is a phenomenon in quantum physics, where groups of particles are generated and interact in such a way that they can only be described with reference to one another.

Add the two phenomena together in a qubit (which is ultimately a storage medium that represents a two-basis quantum state seriously, dont get us started on x and y-basis orthogonals, youll never sleep again), and what you have is a unit of storage that is faster than a quantum bullet.

For instance, remember that with the 0s and 1s of traditional binary-based computers, 8 bits could get you any number between 0-255?

With a qubit, you can get every number between 0-255 at the same time.

That means, for instance, that if were looking at bits and qubits as equals, single units of storage on different systems, that a qubit gets you 255 times as much data per second as a bit can deliver.

Multiply that effect by the kind of numbers of bits in a modern computer, and what you have is an insanely fast, insanely powerful machine, the like of which weve never seen before.

Thats going to be important, because just as were about to enter the age of quantum computing, powered by qubits, we have other transformational technologies coming to fruition that happen to need insanely fast, insanely powerful machines to make the most of them.

Everybodys heard of AI (Artificial Intelligence) and machine learning is an integral technology that powers the algorithms on which it depends. Those technologies are already making staggering differences to the world medical breakthroughs, the digital transformation of the business world, enhanced imaging for everything from self-driving cars to long-range telescopes, and much, much more.

Theyre managing that with standard, bit-based computing technology. Imagine those technologies on a never-ending shot of ultra-espresso, and youre not even halfway to understanding how transformational the power of quantum computing will be to AI and machine learning capabilities.

Theres a potential dark side to the power of quantum computing it will be able to crack most of the cryptography on which our cybersecurity is built in the blink of an electronic eye. But there are already efforts in play to establish standards of post-quantum cryptography, that will render it safe to use and free its users to maximize the potential of the qubits that will drive quantum computing forever forward until the next quantum leap dares to overtake it.

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Quantum computing qubits and why they matter - TechHQ