Transcript

Rene – Hi! Welcome to QuBites, your bite-sized pieces of quantum computing. My name is Rene from Valorem Reply and today we're going to summarize season five of QuBites. Which also means this here today is the 50th episodes of QuBites. Yes 50 episodes since we started in fall of 2020 and what an amazing journey it has been so far and surely it has been very informational also for me of course. I learnt so much during season five of QuBites from all our amazing guests and they shot so much great knowledge and it was a huge pleasure to host them. I hope you also learned as much as I did and it was a valuable use of your time.

So, let's summarize it and we started season five with Mariia Mykhailova from the Azure quantum team and she shared with us new updates of course from Azure quantum, which also included a 500 $ credit that everyone can use to experiment with Azure quantum and play around with the solvers but also actually use it for all tasks and 500 is quite a bit of course. We also talked about a topic which is near and dear to Mariia's heart and also my heart of course- quantum computing education and how can we train the new workforce for quantum computing. She also explained what she's doing with universities there and of course we also talked about her new book about quantum computing, which, by the way, you should get a copy of. I'm sure it's awesome. After that I had a good chat with my fellow Microsoft MVP, Johnny Hooyberghs, while he covered quantum computing for software developers and how well classically trained software engineers like myself as well, can get started with a quantum computing and what was also super cool was Johnny showed his own personal journey and we talked quite a bit about that. In episode three of season five, we had not one but actually two guests- my reply colleague Sarah Felloni and I were joined by her client, Prassede Colombo from the IIBA Italy chapter. And I learnt a lot about the relevance of quantum computing but also business analysis for green business right and how we can ensure better sustainability in our new world. Another reply colleague of mine was a guest for episode four. Anuj Doshi and I talked about the BMW quantum computing challenge again, which you might also remember from season four episode eight, when I talked with Marine Pigneur, when she showed the progress when this challenge the BMW quantum computing challenge was still ongoing. Now of course it's done and so Anuj gave us the final update and also he showed quite a bit more about certain details of the implementation they did by using quantum machine learning circuits. He showed his learnings with us and super insightful, definitely interesting. The intersection of quantum and classical computing was our topic with Robin Coxe from Atom Computing, a quantum computing hardware vendor and Robin explained really well how much classical computing is actually required and classical computing engineering is actually required to make a real quantum computer work. You might be surprised that there's so much classical computing actually involved, not just for controlling these but a lot of other pieces to make a quantum computing actually work and Robin also explained the pretty amazing approach they're doing at Atom computing by leveraging neutral atoms. Really enjoyed this conversation and the conversation with Robin and the episode was probably the longest QuBites episode ever. We probably broke a record there but definitely worth your time. Talking about quantum computing hardware right after this, we had an episode with another colleague of Robin, Kayleigh Cassella and she joined us for a deep-dive into quantum hardware development and we also learnt how a typical day for a quantum computing engineer looks like and how much of working inside of the lab is actually there these days. Again super insightful conversation about quantum computing hardware, which is a topic we don't talk a lot about in our show here, so it was really good to focus on the quantum computing hardware development and learn a little bit about how it actually works under the hood and you know the latest and greatest developments there. In episode seven of season five, I had the pleasure to welcome back Cassandra Granade and this time we didn't talk about the importance of noise simulation, which we talked about in the previous episodes, but this time we had another topic she's working on and we talked about the quantum intermediate representation, QIR, which is an exciting technology that will basically make it much easier to program these, well I would say heterogeneous quantum computing hardware systems we have these days. These have a specific instruction set and QIR basically helps us to have a common abstraction or interpretation layer and so we can target this as a programmers. And we don't have to worry about the specific instruction set of that classical machine, so amazing and super important technology and great conversation again with Cassandra. Well, then I talked with my colleague Kevin McCormick from Valorem Reply and we had a good conversation and he talked to us about the Valorem Reply quantum computing offerings. The stuff we're doing there this year and also, we talked about the demystification of quantum phenomena and Kevin helped us to demystify quantum phenomena. So, watch this episode if you want to learn what entanglement really is and that entanglement isn't actually a spooky action as a distance as Einstein called it, but rather depends on us observing it right. So, a super cool episode highly recommended to watch this. Finally, Bob Sorenson provided us with a quantum computing market analysis based on his long-standing experience as HPC, high performance computing, analyst at Hyperion Research and we talked about the impact we're already seeing today with a quantum inspired solution but all the, of course, the early stages of quantum hardware and Bob also shared his future perspective and I asked him to look into the crystal ball about the future of the general quantum computing market. So, really good conversations again and overall, of course amazing conversations.

Well now we're here with the summary of season five. Already 50 episodes, that's quite a thing I would say, and really happy about the turn out there with all the great guests. Well, I hope you also enjoyed the show as much as I did and it's always a big pleasure and honor for me, you know, talking and hosting all these fantastic guests and having some really insightful conversation. As you can imagine, we're already thinking about a season five of QuBites, afterward probably- will take a short break hereafter season five and then we will continue with season six. And so let us know what you have in mind. If you have any topics in mind or if you think- oh there's a really good guest Rene should interview, please reach out whatever way you find, like through my social channels or our website. Your feedback is so important, so please send us your feedback, the good and the bad ones of course. We want to hear all of that and of course use this to improve the show. If you have any recommendations for topics, guests or maybe you want to be a guest, just reach out, everything is fair and very open.

Thank you so much for joining us again for QuBites, your bite-sized pieces of quantum computing. Please watch our blog, follow our social media channels to hear all about the next episodes. And of course, you can watch the previous episodes on our website. You can find the links to all of the episodes there and you will also know if you follow us on social when we will launch season six. Please reach out if you have any ideas, we're always happy to chat about it. Well thank you so much, take care and see you soon! Bye-bye!