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A new government initiative will direct hundreds of millions of dollars to support new centers for quantum computing research.

Why it matters: Quantum information science represents the next leap forward for computing, opening the door to powerful machines that can help provide answers to some of our most pressing questions. The nation that takes the lead in quantum will stake a pole position for the future.

Details: The five new quantum research centers established in national labs across the country are part of a $1 billion White House program announced Wednesday morning that includes seven institutes that will explore different facets of AI, including precision agriculture and forecast prediction.

How it works: While AI is better known and increasingly integrated into our daily lives hey, Siri quantum computing is just as important, promising huge leaps forward in computer processing power.

Of note: Albert Einstein famously hated the concept of entanglement, describing it as "spooky action at a distance." But the idea has held up over decades of research in quantum science.

Quantum computers won't replace classical ones wholesale in part because the process of manipulating quantum particles is still highly tricky but as they develop, they'll open up new frontiers in computing.

What they're saying: "Quantum is the biggest revolution in computers since the advent of computers," says Dario Gil, director of IBM Research. "With the quantum bit, you can actually rethink the nature of information."

The catch: While the underlying science behind quantum computers is decades old, quantum computers are only just now beginning to be used commercially.

What to watch: Who ultimately wins out on quantum supremacy the act of demonstrating that a quantum computer can solve a problem that even the fastest classical computer would be unable to solve in a feasible time frame.

The bottom line: The age of quantum computers isn't quite here yet, but it promises to be one of the major technological drivers of the 21st century.

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Why quantum computing matters - Axios

AFRICA

South Africa is a few steps ahead in the advancement of quantum computing and quantum technologies in general, said Mark Tame, professor in photonics at Stellenbosch University in the Western Cape.

South Africas University of KwaZulu-Natal has also been working on quantum computing for more than a decade, gradually building up a community around the field.

The buzz about quantum computing in South Africa just started recently due to the agreement between [Johannesburgs] University of the Witwatersrand and IBM, said Professor Francesco Petruccione, interim director, National Institute for Theoretical and Computational Science, and South African Research Chair in Quantum Information Processing and Communication at the School of Chemistry and Physics Quantum Research Group, University of KwaZulu-Natal.

Interest was intensified by Googles announcement last October that it had developed a 53-qubit device which it claimed took 200 seconds to sample one instance of a quantum circuit a million times. The IT company claimed it would take a state-of-the-art digital supercomputer 10,000 years to achieve this.

A University of Waterloo Institute for Quantum Computing paper stresses quantum computers ability to express a signal (a qubit) of more than one value at the same time (the superposition ability) with that signal being manifested in another device independently, but in exactly the same way (the entanglement ability). This enables quantum computers to handle much more complex questions and problems than standard computers using binary codes of ones and zeros.

The IBM Research Laboratory in Johannesburg offers African researchers the potential to harness such computing power. It was established in 2015, part of a 10-year investment programme through the South African governments Department of Trade and Industry.

It is a portal to the IBM Quantum Experience, a cloud-based quantum computing platform accessible to other African universities that are part of the African Research Universities Alliance (ARUA), which involves 16 of the continents leading universities (in Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, Tanzania, Uganda and South Africa).

Levelling of the playing field

The IBM development has levelled the playing field for students, [giving them] access to the same hardware as students elsewhere in the world. There is nothing to hold them back to develop quantum applications and code. This has been really helpful for us at Stellenbosch to work on projects which need access to quantum processors not available to the general public, said Tame.

While IBM has another centre on the continent, at the Catholic University of Eastern Africa in Nairobi, Kenya, in 2018 the University of the Witwatersrand became the first African university to join the American computing giants Quantum Computing Network. They are starting to increase the network to have an army of quantum experts, said Professor Zeblon Vilakazi, a nuclear physicist, and vice-chancellor and principal of the University of the Witwatersrand.

At a continental level, Vilakazi said Africa is still in a learning phase regarding quantum computing. At this early stage we are still developing the skills and building a network of young students, he said. The university has sent students to IBMs Zurich facility to learn about quantum computing, he said.

To spur cooperation in the field, a Quantum Africa conference has been held every year since 2010, with the first three in South Africa, and others in Algeria and Morocco. Last years event was in Stellenbosch, while this years event, to be hosted at the University of Rwanda, was postponed until 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Growing African involvement

Rwanda is making big efforts to set up quantum technology centres, and I have former students now working in Botswana and the Gambia. It is slowly diffusing around the continent, said Petruccione.

Academics participating at the Stellenbosch event included Yassine Hassouni of Mohammed V University, Rabat; Nigerian academic Dr Obinna Abah of Queens University Belfast; and Haikel Jelassi of the National Centre for Nuclear Sciences and Technologies, Tunisia.

In South Africa, experimental and theoretical work is also being carried out into quantum communications the use of quantum physics to carry messages via fibre optic cable.

A lot of work is being done on the hardware side of quantum technologies by various groups, but funding for these things is not the same order of magnitude as in, say, North America, Australia or the UK. We have to do more with less, said Tame.

Stellenbosch, near Cape Town, is carrying out research into quantum computing, quantum communication and quantum sensing (the ability to detect if a quantum-sent message is being read).

I would like it to grow over the next few years by bringing in more expertise and help the development of quantum computing and technologies for South Africa, said Tame.

Witwatersrand is focusing on quantum optics, as is Petrucciones team, while there is collaboration in quantum computing with the University of Johannesburg and the University of Pretoria.

University programmes

Building up and retaining talent is a key challenge as the field expands in Africa, as is expanding courses in quantum computing.

South Africa doesnt offer a masters in quantum computing, or an honours programme, which we need to develop, said Petruccione.

This is set to change at the University of the Witwatersrand.

We will launch a syllabus in quantum computing, and were in the process of developing courses at the graduate level in physics, natural sciences and engineering. But such academic developments are very slow, said Vilakazi.

Further development will hinge on governmental support, with a framework programme for quantum computing being developed by Petruccione. There is interest from the [South African] Department of Science and Innovation. Because of [the economic impact of] COVID-19, I hope some money is left for quantum technology, but at least the government is willing to listen to the community, he said.

Universities are certainly trying to tap non-governmental support to expand quantum computing, engaging local industries, banks and pharmaceutical companies to get involved in supporting research.

We have had some interesting interactions with local banks, but it needs to be scaled up, said Petruccione.

Applications

While African universities are working on quantum computing questions that could be applicable anywhere in the world, there are plans to look into more localised issues. One is drug development for tuberculosis, malaria and HIV, diseases that have afflicted Southern Africa for decades, with quantum computings ability to handle complex modelling of natural structures a potential boon.

There is potential there for helping in drug development through quantum simulations. It could also help develop quantum computing networks in South Africa and more broadly across the continent, said Vilakazi.

Agriculture is a further area of application. The production of fertilisers is very expensive as it requires high temperatures, but bacteria in the soil do it for free. The reason we cant do what bacteria do is because we dont understand it. The hope is that as quantum computing is good at chemical reactions, maybe we can model it and that would lead to cheaper fertilisers, said Petruccione.

With the world in a quantum computing race, with the US and China at the forefront, Africa is well positioned to take advantage of developments. We can pick the best technology coming out of either country, and that is how Africa should position itself, said Vilakazi.

Petrucciones group currently has collaborations with Russia, India and China. We want to do satellite quantum communication. The first step is to have a ground station, but that requires investment, he said.

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A continent works to grow its stake in quantum computing - University World News

900 faculty from top Indian institutes to be trained

New Delhi, August 24, 2020: Microsoft is creating a new program to build quantum computing skills and capabilities in the academic community in India. As part of this initiative, Microsoft Garage is organizing a Train the Trainer program in collaboration with Electronics and ICT Academies at Malaviya National Institute of Technology (MNIT), Jaipur and National Institute of Technology, Patna.

This program will train 900 faculty from Universities and Institutes across India through E & ICT Academies at Institutes of National Importance such as IIT Kanpur, IIT Guwahati, IIT Roorkee, MNIT Jaipur, NIT Patna, IIIT-D Jabalpur, and NIT Warangal, equipping academics with the required skills to start building their quantum future.

Quantum computing applies the properties of quantum physics to process information. Quantum computers will enable new discoveries in the areas of healthcare, energy, environmental systems, smart materials, and beyond. Microsoft is bringing the capabilities to develop for this quantum future, to the cloud with Azure Quantum.

Azure Quantum is an open cloud ecosystem enabling developers to access diverse quantum software, hardware, and solutions from Microsoft and its partners. It is built on Azure, a trusted, scalable and secure platform, and will continue to adapt to Microsofts rapidly evolving cloud future. Moreover, it delivers the ability to have impact today through quantum inspired solvers running on classical hardware and to explorations on classical hardware using the open source Quantum Development Kit and the Q# programming language.

The Quantum training program through the E & ICT Academies, supports an initiative by Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology (MeitY) to enhance the skills of the academicians in imparting next level technological skills for future generations. Key themes that will be covered include an introduction to quantum information, quantum concepts such as superposition and entanglement, processing of information using qubits and quantum gates, as well as an introduction to quantum machine learning and quantum programming.

Rajiv Kumar, Managing Director, Microsoft India Development Center, and Corporate Vice President, Enterprise+Devices India, said, India is renowned across the world for its science, technology, engineering, mathematics and computing (STEM+C) workforce, and a tech-capable citizenry. Through this initiative in India, we aim to develop skills in quantum at scale, which has the potential to trigger the new frontier of innovation, shaping the future of the IT industry in this part of the world.

Inaugurating the program, Ms. Reena Dayal, Director, Microsoft Garage India & Chair for IEEE Quantum SIG, said, Quantum computing holds the potential to solve some of the most pressing issues our world faces today. Through this program, we aim to equip academia in India with the requisite knowledge to develop a comprehensive Quantum learning curriculum in their institutions and help develop these skills among some of the brightest minds in the country.

The training program will be conducted virtually, from August 24 Aug 29, 2020. The program will also cover practical coding for participants using Microsoft Q# & Quantum Development Kit.

Speaking on the collaboration, Prof. Udaykumar R Yaragatti, Director, MNIT Jaipur said, The institute is committed to providing state-of-the-art technologies to students and this collaboration with Microsoft will provide further encouragement to faculty members to explore the different aspects of Quantum Computing.

Prof. Pradip K Jain, Director, NIT Patna said, The COVID situation has given an opportunity for going digital with this program. This partnership will ignite the passion in faculty members who will in turn share the knowledge with their students.

About The Microsoft Garage

The Microsoft Garage is a program that drives a culture of experimentation and innovation at Microsoft. They deliver programs and experiences to our employees, customers, and ecosystem that drive collaboration and creativity. Their motto doers, not talkers continues to be the core. The Garage attracts people who are passionate about making a difference in the world. Garage India works on Cutting Edge Technologies and actively engages with the Ecosystem in India.

About Microsoft

Microsoft (Nasdaq MSFT @microsoft) enables digital transformation for the era of an intelligent cloud and an intelligent edge. Its mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. Microsoft set up its India operations in 1990. Today, Microsoft entities in India have over 11,000 employees, engaged in sales and marketing, research, development and customer services and support, across 11 Indian cities Ahmedabad, Bengaluru, Chennai, New Delhi, Gurugram, Noida, Hyderabad, Kochi, Kolkata, Mumbai, and Pune. Microsoft offers its global cloud services from local data centers to accelerate digital transformation across Indian startups, businesses, and government organizations.

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New Microsoft program to help develop the quantum computing workforce of the future in India - Microsoft

The quest to build the ultimate computer has taken a big step forward following breakthroughs in ensuring its answers can be trusted.

Known as a quantum computer, such a machine exploits bizarre effects in the sub-atomic world to perform calculations beyond the reach of conventional computers.

First proposed almost 40 years ago, tech giants Microsoft, Google and IBM are among those racing to exploit the power of quantum computing, which is expected to transform fields ranging from weather forecasting and drug design to artificial intelligence.

The power of quantum computers comes from their use of so-called qubits, the quantum equivalent of the 1s and 0s bits used by conventional number-crunchers.

Unlike bits, qubits exploit a quantum effect allowing them to be both 1s and 0s at the same time. The impact on processing power is astonishing. Instead of processing, say, 100 bits in one go, a quantum computer could crunch 100 qubits, equivalent to 2 to the power 100, or a million trillion trillion bits.

At least, that is the theory. The problem is that the property of qubits that gives them their abilities known as quantum superposition is very unstable.

Once created, even the slightest vibration, temperature shift or electromagnetic signal can disturb the qubits, causing errors in calculations. Unless the superposition can be maintained long enough, the quantum computer either does a few calculations well or a vast amount badly.

For years, the biggest achievement of any quantum computer involved using a few qubits to find the prime factors of 15 (which every schoolchild knows are 3 and 5).

Using complex shielding methods, researchers can now stabilise around 50 qubits long enough to perform impressive calculations.

Last October, Google claimed to have built a quantum computer that solved in 200 seconds a maths problem that would have taken an ultra-fast conventional computer more than 10,000 years.

Yet even this billion-fold speed-up is just a shadow of what would be possible if qubits could be kept stable for longer. At present, many of the qubits have their powers wasted being used to spot and fix errors.

Now two teams of researchers have independently found new ways of tackling the error problem.

Physicists at the University of Chicago have found a way of keeping qubits stable for longer not by blocking disturbances, but by blurring them.

It is like sitting on a merry-go-round with people yelling all around you

Dr Kevin Miao, computing expert

In some quantum computers, the qubits take the form of electrons whose direction of spin is a superposition of both up and down. By adding a constantly flipping magnetic field, the team found that the electrons rotated so quickly that they barely noticed outside disturbances. The researchers explain the trick with an analogy: It's like sitting on a merry-go-round with people yelling all around you, says team member Dr Kevin Miao. When the ride is still, you can hear them perfectly, but if you're rapidly spinning, the noise blurs into a background.

Describing their work in the journal Science, the team reported keeping the qubits working for about 1/50th of a second - around 10,000 times longer than their lifetime if left unshielded. According to the team, the technique is simple to use but effective against all the standard sources of disturbance. Meanwhile, researchers at the University of Sydney have come up with an algorithm that allows a quantum computer to work out how its qubits are being affected by disturbances and fix the resulting errors. Reporting their discovery in Nature Physics, the team says their method is ready for use with current quantum computers, and could work with up to 100 qubits.

These breakthroughs come at a key moment for quantum computing. Even without them, the technology is already spreading beyond research laboratories.

In June, the title of worlds most powerful quantum computer was claimed not by a tech giant but by Honeywell a company perhaps best known for central heating thermostats.

Needless to say, the claim is contested by some, not least because the machine is reported to have only six qubits. But Honeywell points out that it has focused its research on making those qubits ultra-stable which allows them to work reliably for far longer than rival systems. Numbers of qubits alone, in other words, are not everything.

And the company insists this is just the start. It plans to boost the performance of its quantum computer ten-fold each year for the next five years, making it 100,000 times more powerful still.

But apart from bragging rights, why is a company like Honeywell trying to take on the tech giants in the race for the ultimate computer ?

A key clue can be found in remarks made by Honeywell insiders to Forbes magazine earlier this month. These reveal that the company wants to use quantum computers to discover new kinds of materials.

Doing this involves working out how different molecules interact together to form materials with the right properties. Thats something conventional computers are already used for. But quantum computers wont just bring extra number-crunching power to bear. Crucially, like molecules themselves, their behaviour reflects the bizarre laws of quantum theory. And this makes them ideal for creating accurate simulations of quantum phenomena like the creation of new materials.

This often-overlooked feature of quantum computers was, in fact, the original motivation of the brilliant American physicist Richard Feynman, who first proposed their development in 1981.

Honeywell already has plans to use quantum computers to identify better refrigerants. These compounds were once notorious for attacking the Earths ozone layer, but replacements still have unwanted environmental effects. Being relatively simple chemicals, the search for better refrigerants is already within the reach of current quantum computers.

But Honeywell sees a time when far more complex molecules such as drugs will also be discovered using the technology.

For the time being, no quantum computer can match the all-round number-crunching power of standard computers. Just as Honeywell made its claim, the Japanese computer maker Fujitsu unveiled a supercomputer capable of over 500 million billion calculations a second.

Even so, the quantum computer is now a reality and before long it will make even the fastest supercomputer seem like an abacus.

Robert Matthews is Visiting Professor of Science at Aston University, Birmingham, UK

Updated: August 21, 2020 12:06 PM

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Has the world's most powerful computer arrived? - The National

Computers have underpinned the digital transformation of the banking and financial services sector, and quantum computing promises to elevate this transformation to a radically new level. BBVA, the digital bank for the 21st centuryestablished in 1857 and today the second largest bank in Spainis at the forefront of investigating the benefits of quantum computing.

Will quantum computing move banking to a new level of digital transformation?

We are trying to understand the potential impact of quantum computing over the next 5 years, says Carlos Kuchkovsky, global head of research and patents at BBVA. Last month, BBVA announced initial results from their recent exploration of quantum computings advantage over traditional computer methods. Kuchkovskys team looked at complex financial problems with many dimensions or variables that require computational calculations that sometimes take days to complete. In the case of investment portfolio optimization, for example, they found that the use of quantum and quantum-inspired algorithms could represent a significant speed-up compared to traditional techniques when there are more than 100 variables.

Carlos Kuchkovsky, Global Head of Research and Patents, BBVA

After hiring researchers with expertise in quantum computing, BBVA identified fifteen challenges that could be solved better with quantum computing, faster and with greater accuracy, says Kuchkovsky. The results released last month were for six of these challenges, serving as proofs-of-concept for, first and foremost, the development of quantum algorithms and also for their application in the following five financial services tasks: Static and dynamic portfolio optimization, credit scoring process optimization, currency arbitrage optimization, and derivative valuations and adjustments.

Another important dimension of BBVAs quantum computing journey is developing an external network. The above six proofs-of-concept were pursued in collaboration with external partners bringing to the various investigations their own set of skills and expertise: The Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), the startups Zapata Computing and Multiverse, the technology firm Fujitsu, and the consulting firm Accenture.

Kuchkovsky advises technology and business executives in other companies, in any industry, to follow BBVAs initial stepssurveying the current state of the technology and the major players, developing internal expertise and experience with quantum computing and consolidating the internal team, identifying specific business problems, activities and opportunities where quantum computing could provide an advantage over todays computers, and develop an external network by connecting to and collaborating with relevant research centers and companies.

As for how to organize internally for quantum computing explorations, Kuchkovsky thinks there could be different possibilities, depending on the level of maturity of the research and technology functions of the business. In BBVAs case, the effort started in the research function and he thinks will evolve in a year or two to a full-fledged quantum computing center of excellence.

Quantum computing is evolving rapidly and Kuchkovsky predicts that in five years, companies around the world will enjoy full access to quantum computing as a service and will benefit from the application of quantum algorithms, also provided as a service. Specifically, he thinks we will see the successful application of quantum computing to machine learning (e.g., improving fraud detection in the banking sector). With the growing interest in quantum computing, Kuchkovsky believes that in five years there will be a sufficient supply of quantum computing talent to satisfy the demand for quantum computing expertise.

The development of a talent pool of experienced and knowledgeable quantum computing professionals depends among other things on close working relationships between academia and industry. These relationships tend to steer researchers towards practical problems and specific business challenges and, in turn, helps in upgrading the skills of engineers working in large corporations and orient them toward quantum computing.

In Kuchocvskys estimation, the connection between academia and industry is relatively weaker in Europe compared to the United States. But there are examples of such collaboration, such as BBVAs work with CSIC and the European Unions Quantum Technologies Flagship, bringing together research centers, industry, and public funding agencies.

On July 29, Fujitsu announced a new collaboration with BBVA, to test whether a quantum computer could outperform traditional computing techniques in optimizing asset portfolios, helping minimize risk while maximizing returns, based on a decades worth of historical data. In the release, Kuchkovsky summarized BBVAs motivation for exploring quantum computing: Our research is helping us identify the areas where quantum computing could represent a greater competitive advantage, once the tools have sufficiently matured. At BBVA, we believe that quantum technology will be key to solving some of the major challenges facing society this decade. Addressing these challenges dovetails with BBVAs strategic priorities, such as fostering the more efficient use of increasingly greater volumes of data for better decision-making as well as supporting the transition to a more sustainable future.

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BBVA Uncovers The Promise Of Quantum Computing For Banking And Financial Services - Forbes