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New technology and ethics are inseparably linked in today's rapidly evolving technological landscape. Quantum computing is no exception: as we stand on the precipice of a new era of computing, the ethical considerations that arise are complex and far-reaching. As a company that recognises the importance of these ethical consideration and is committed to responsible innovation, we believe that these concerns must be understood and addressed.

Ethical quantum concerns typically fall into several major categories:

1. Resource Allocation and Inequality: Quantum computing is a resource-intensive technology, both in terms of the physical resources required to build quantum computers and the human resources needed to program and operate them. Such resources are available only to a few nations. Given this, and given the rise in quantum nationalism - the development of country-specific quantum programs - will the benefits of quantum computing primarily accrue to the wealthy, developed nations that can afford to invest in it? This could further deepen global socio-economic divides. Within the legal frameworks of the countries QuEra operates in, we seek to provide equitable access to potential users, whether via the cloud or by owning a quantum computer.

2. Misuse of power: a sufficiently powerful quantum computer could one day break many current encryption schemes leading to unparalleled breaches of privacy and security. Thats why many experts warn against bad actors that implement Store Now Decrypt Later, capturing encrypted information today while hoping to decrypt it in a few years. This is especially relevant for information with a long shelf life such as medical records or certain financial transactions

3. Accountability and Transparency: The complexity of quantum algorithms could lead to a lack of transparency and accountability. If a quantum algorithm, for instance, makes a mistake or causes harm, it may be difficult to understand why or how it happened. Ensuring such explainability is a key requirement of many algorithms such as those deciding the outcome of a loan application. At QuEra, we seek to understand the reasons certain algorithms work and share this knowledge with our customers.

4. Job Displacement: The increased processing power and efficiency of quantum computers could automate many jobs currently performed by humans, leading to potential job displacement. We do our best to support education and re-training programs both to address the potential of job displacement as well as to train the next generation of scientists and technicians that will help build, program and maintain these advanced machines.

Some of these categories, such as job displacement, are not specific to quantum computing and present themselves when discussing other technologies such as AI or robotics. Others breaking the encryption system - are specific to quantum, whereas AI presents its own unique challenges such as bias and discrimination, the ability to generate artificial consciousness.

Striving to address these concerns, several organisations have started constructing ethical frameworks for quantum computing. The World Economic Forum has developed a set of Quantum Computing Governance Principles that aim to guide the responsible development and use of quantum computing including inclusiveness and equity, security and safety, environmental sustainability, and transparency and accountability. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine has published a report on The Ethics of Quantum Computing that identifies a number of ethical issues including the potential malicious use of quantum computing, the potential to disrupt existing industries, the negative environmental potential, and the need to ensure that quantum computing is developed and used in a way that is fair and equitable. Last, Deloitte has developed a Trustworthy & Ethical Tech Framework that can be used to guide the development and use of quantum computing.

Beyond ethical frameworks, one could imagine some solutions. Job displacement, for instance, is often associated with the introduction of transformative technologies. Factory workers that manually assembled cars might find themselves displaced by robots, but these robots need to be built and serviced by people. If quantum computers make certain jobs obsolete, they open other opportunities.

Other solutions might require multinational collaboration. For example, the World Health Organization serves an important function that ultimately helps both developed as well as developing nations. Promoting standards, monitoring global trends, and coordinating emergency responses have helped address inequality in healthcare, benefiting all. Similarly, a World Quantum Organization might provide shared quantum resources to benefit all, not just those that could develop an autonomous quantum ecosystem.

Concurrent with developing solutions and ethical frameworks, there is a need to educate and inform the public, policymakers, and stakeholders about the potential implications of quantum computing to foster informed discussions about its ethical, social, and economic impacts.

Quantum computing's potential to revolutionise industries is matched by the complexity of the ethical considerations it raises. At QuEra, we recognise these challenges and are committed to responsible innovation that prioritises inclusiveness, security, and sustainability. Collaborative efforts, such as the proposed 'World Quantum Organization,' resonate with our belief in shared quantum resources and global partnerships, and we invite interested parties to engage with us. As we navigate this exciting frontier, we must do so with both eyes open to the potential downsides, ready to tackle them head-on, and always guided by ethical principles.

Yuval Boger is the Chief Marketing Officer at QuEra Computing.

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Quantum computing and ethics - Scientific Computing World

Stakeholders in the biopharmaceutical industry are currently exploring the implementation of quantum computing in order to expedite the drug discovery process and cut down the overall R&D capital investment

LONDON, Sept. 6, 2023 /PRNewswire/ --Roots Analysishas announced the addition of "Quantum Computing Marketin Drug Discovery, 2023-2035" report to its list of offerings.

Owing to the various benefits of quantum computing, such as big data processing and complex molecular modeling for minimizing cost and time investment, the adoption rate of quantum computing in pharmaceutical industry is expected to increase rapidly during the forecast period. Additionally, various partnerships have been inked for application of quantum computing in drug discovery. Majority of these partnerships are research and development agreements, followed by platform utilization agreements. Drug developers require support from both quantum computing software and hardware developers. In July 2021, Riverlane and Astex Pharmaceuticals announced their collaboration with Rigetti Computing to utilize their quantum systems along with Riverlane's algorithm expertise to develop molecular models of chemical compounds and study their interaction with proteins in the human body.

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The research also includes detailed profiles of the key players (listed below) engaged in the quantum computing in drug discovery services market; each profile features an overview of the company, its financial information (if available), details related to its service portfolio, and recent developments and an informed future outlook.

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The quantum computing in drug discovery services market is ... - PR Newswire

The effect of quantum computing on Artificial Intelligence could be as understated as it is profound.

Some say quantum computing is necessary to achieve General Artificial Intelligence. Certain expressions of this paradigm, such as quantum annealing, are inherently probabilistic and optimal for machine learning. The most pervasive quantum annealing use cases center on optimization and constraints, problems that have traditionally involved non-statistical AI approaches like rules, symbols, and reasoning.

When one considers the fact that there are now cloud options for accessing this form of quantum computing (replete with resources for making it enterprise-applicable for any number of deployments) sans expensive hardware, one fact becomes unmistakably clear.

With quantum computing, a lot of times were talking about what will it be able to do in the future, observed Mark Johnson,D-WaveSVP of Quantum Technologies and Systems Products. But no, you can do things with it today.

Granted, not all those things involve data science intricacies. Supply chain management and logistics are just as easily handled by quantum annealing technologies. But, when these applications are considered in tandem with some of the more progressive approaches to AI-enabled by quantum annealing, their esteem to organizations across verticals becomes apparent.

Quantum annealing involves the variety of quantum computing in which, when the quantum computer reaches its lowest energy state, it solves a specific problem even NP-hard problems. Thus, whether users are trying to select features for a machine learning model or the optimum route to send a fleet of grocery store delivery drivers, quantum annealing approaches provide these solutions when the lowest energy state is achieved. Annealing quantum computing is a heuristic probabilistic solver, Johnson remarked. So, you might end up with the very best answer possible or, if you dont, you will end up with a very good answer.

Quantum annealings merit lies in its ability to supply these answers at an enormous scale such as that required for a defense agencys need to analyze all possible threats and responses for a specific location at a given time. It excels in cases in which you need to consider many, many possibilities and its hard to wade through them, Johnson mentioned. Classical computational models consider each possibility one at a time for such a combinatorial optimization problem.

Quantum annealing considers those possibilities simultaneously.

The data science implications for this computational approach are almost limitless. One developer resource D-Wave has made available via the cloud is a plug-in for the SDK for Ocean a suite of open source Python tools that integrates with scikit-learn to improve feature selection. It supports recognizing in a large pattern of data, can I pick out features that correlate with certain things and being able to navigate that, Johnson remarked. I understand it ends up mapping into an optimization problem. The statistical aspects of quantum annealing are suitable for other facets of advanced machine learning, too.

According to Johnson, because of its probabilistic nature, one of the interesting things that quantum annealing does is not just picking the best answer or a good answer, but coming up with a distribution, a diversity of answers, and understanding the collection of answers and a little about how they relate to each other. This quality of quantum annealing is useful for numerous dimensions of machine learning includingbackpropagation, which is used to adjust a neural networks parameters while going from the output to the input. It can also reinforce what Johnson termed Boltzmann sampling, which involves randomly sampling combinatorial structures.

There are considerable advantages to making quantum annealing available through the cloud. The cloud architecture for accessing this form of computing is just as viable for accessing what Johnson called the gate model type of quantum computing, which is primed for factoring numbers and used in RSA encryption schema, Johnson confirmed. Organizations can avail themselves of quantum annealing in D-Waves cloud platform. Moreover, they can also utilize hybrid quantum and classical computinginfrastructure as well, which is becoming ever more relevant in modern quantum computing conversations. You would just basically be using both of them together for the part of the problem thats most efficient, Johnson explained.

In addition to the ready availability of each of these computational models, D-Waves cloud platform furnishes documentation for a range of example use cases for common business problems across industries. Theres also an integrated developer environment you can pull up that already has in it Ocean, our open source suite of tools, which help the developer interface with the quantum computer, Johnson added. Examples include the ability to write code in Python. When organizations find documentation in the cloud about a previous use case thats similar to theirs, You can pull up sample code that will use the quantum computer to solve that problem in your integrated developer environment, Johnson noted.

That sample code provides an excellent starting point for developers to build applications for applying quantum computing and hybrid quantum and classical computing methods to an array of business problems pertaining to financial services, manufacturing, life sciences, manufacturing, and more. Its just one of the many benefits of quantum computing through the cloud. The appeal of quantum annealing, of course, lies in its ability to expedite the time required to solve combinatorial optimization problems.

As the ready examples of quantum solutions the vast majority of which entail quantum annealing across the aforesaid verticals indicate, such issues are, the harder we look, ubiquitous throughout business, Johnson indicated. The data science utility of quantum annealing for feature selection, Boltzmann sampling, and backpropagation is equally horizontal and may prove influential to the adoption rates of this computational approach.

See more here:
D-Wave Suggests Quantum Annealing Could Help AI - The New Stack

The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation awarded $1.25 million to 21 experimental physicists at the end of August, including associate physics professor Keji Lai.

The Experimental Physics Investigators Initiative grant, awarded through the foundation, aims to support researchers with innovative ideas who lack the funding to pursue research, Lai said. He plans to use the funding to study the properties of sound and how it can be imaged to further researchers understanding of advanced technology.

The (grant) funds faculty in the middle of their careers to explore new and creative research ideas that might be too speculative to be funded through more traditional mechanisms, said Andreas Matouschek, associate dean for research and facilities at the College of Natural Sciences, in a written response.

Lais proposal details a device that can image acoustic waves being transmitted between acoustic devices, like speakers and microphones in phones, under ultra-low temperatures, contributing to the field of quantum computing, which is a major branch of quantum information science.

Sound doesnt have to propagate in air, Lai said. It can propagate in liquid. It can propagate in solids. Its this particular property of sound that propagates in solid where we usually dont call it sound, we call it acoustic waves. That kind of property has already been very well explored by electrical engineers In fact, the cell phones that you and I are using these days have a lot of (acoustic) devices that are based on acoustic waves.

The research has implications for the transportation of large amounts of data. Computers used in daily life have classical bits, which are semiconductor chips that use zeroes and ones to store data, said Lai.

In quantum computation, those quantum bits have a much larger space to store information, Lai said. In fact, people are considering using acoustic waves to communicate using the acoustic wave to transport those quantities from one side to another.

The proposed device would help researchers better understand the process of quantum, and as a result, improve its efficiency, Lai said.

This tool potentially will provide some kind of way to go down to the inner workings of these chips and image or visualize how these cards are actually going inside the computer, Lai said. This will provide a way to help us: number one, understand the operation of quantum computation, (and) number two, help to debug and (know) when something does not go right.

The Strategic Research Initiatives at CNS assisted Lai with his proposal to the Moore Foundation. The initiative is now working with Lai to provide him with the necessary facilities to complete his project, said Emily Cole, director of strategic research initiatives for CNS.

This award allows Dr. Lai to pursue his most creative, curiosity-driven ideas, which could lead to the next breakthrough in quantum computing, Cole said in a written response. We want to see our researchers win similar awards and always encourage our faculty to pursue these opportunities.

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Research grant awarded to UT physics professor The Daily Texan - The Daily Texan

Theres a joke, playing on the quantum worlds unique properties, that goes, There are three types of people in this world: Those who understand quantum computing, those who dont understand quantum computing, and those who simultaneously do and do not understand quantum computing. All kidding aside, Weiwen Jiang sees a world in which quantum computing is in widespread use; with new funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF), he is taking steps toward that goal.

Jiang, an assistant professor in George Mason Universitys Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, is leading two recently awarded NSF projectsworth a total $900,000for work on the development of these complex devices and on building the quantum workforce of tomorrow.

Quantum computers differ from classical computers in that they use elements of quantum mechanics to perform calculations, allowing them to operate much faster and crunch more data. While there are several operational quantum computers in useIBM and Google are among the top manufacturersthey currently are far from their promised potential and simply cannot yet make the large-scale calculations predicted of them.

Jiang said one key problem is, They are not stable. We can use them for computations, but you might get one answer today and then get an entirely different answer tomorrow.

Quantum devices are notoriously susceptible to noisespecifically, things like cosmic rays, changes in the Earth's magnetic field, radiation, and even mobile wi-fi signals. The noise contributes to the devices instability.

The $600,000 collaborative grant will fund the work of Jiang and his collaborators from Kent State University in developing an adaptor that will adjust to fluctuating noise, improving the performance of applications on quantum devices. Jiang is well versed on the topic, having recently won the Best Poster Award for System-level optimizations in improving the robustness of quantum applications on unstable quantum devices at an event at Oak Ridge National Lab.

According to Jiangs preliminary works, the deployment of the quantum applications faces several challenges, including: sustainabilityon one quantum processor, most quantum applications are sensitive to the temporal changes of quantum noise; portabilitydifferent quantum processors (even from the same vendor) with specific properties will lead to variation of model uncertainty; and transparencya lack of visualization tools can block users from tailoring their quantum applications to quantum computers for higher reliability. The NSF project will systematically provide solutions in response to these challenges.

Jiang is optimistic about the future of quantum computing: Every year, we see a lot of breakthroughs. Just a couple of months ago IBM published a paper on noise reduction. And every year, we see that the number of qubits in quantum computers increases from five in the year 2000 to over 400 on a new computer from IBM. (A qubit is the basic unit of information used in quantum computing, much like a 1 and 0 for traditional computing.)

Another grant, which Jiang shares with collaborators MingzhenTian and JessicaRosenberg in the College of Science, provides $300,000 from NSF to bolster the quantum workforce pipeline. The grant is for an end-to-end quantum system integration training program. The faculty members are developing a new course at Mason, organizing workshops at the IEEE International Conference on Quantum Computing in September (where Jiang is the quantum system track co-chair), and conducting tutorials at international conferences. Recently the team, led by Rosenberg, coordinated a summer immersion program at Mason for high school students. In addition, in the coming months, Jiang will be conducting seminars at a variety of minority-serving institutions in the DC region.

Jiang said the opportunities for quantum-trained engineers are robust and growing. I have collaborations locally with Leidos and MITRE, for example, and they have needs in this field. Further, we know that quantum will make a difference in everything from finance to drug discovery to machine learning and beyond.

He is encouraged about the quantum futureboth in the world and here at Mason. He stressed that as student demand grows for this technology, we need to provide the appropriate materials for our students, because were seeing a lot of strong interest in this field.

More:
Quantum Conundrums: Navigating Noise and Enhancing Expertise - George Mason University