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13.4.2021
Will Zeng

Unitary Fund Q1 2021 Update: New grants and a Mitiq release driven by the community

Unitary Fund Q1 2021 Update: New grants and a Mitiq release driven by the community

Unitary Fund is a non-profit working to create a quantum technology ecosystem that benefits the most people.

13 April, 2021

To the Unitary Fund community,

It’s been an amazing year at Unitary Fund so far: we’ve grown our microgrant program, launched a new streaming talk series, and opened up a Discord server for the community.

We continue to work hard to support the development of a vibrant, open quantum technology ecosystem. Thanks to all of you who have joined us in this mission.

  • New from Unitary Fund

  • We are running UnitaryHack, our first quantum open source hackathon with SWAG and BOUNTIES, on May 14-30th!

  • Welcome Olivia!** Our newest team member, Olivia has joined as our new Administration to help us grow and optimize Unitary Fund ‘s programs.**

  • Help wanted: We are hiring for technical staff positions. We’re not only interested in quantum experienced applicants, but also diverse applicants with full stack web experience.

  • If you missed it, read our 2020 Annual Report here.

  • About Mitiq: 

  • We continue to develop in the open, and now at its 0.7.0 release on PyPI. You can join our community call on Fridays at 2:30pm ET on Discord ( discord.unitary.fund)

  • Mitiq v.0.7.0 contains several contributions from the community! Thanks to @yhindy for adding a method to parametrically scale noise in circuit, to @elmahmoud for adding a factory for zero noise extrapolation, to @aaron-robertson and @pchung39 for adding Qiskit executors with depolarizing noise to the utils, to @purva-thakre for several fixes and improvements. Thanks also to @BobinMathew and @marwahaha for typo corrections.

  • We added probabilistic error correction (PEC) to the quantum error mitigation techniques. 

  • Everyone can now contribute examples to the documentation directly with Jupyter Notebooks thanks to a new MystNB-based infrastructure.

  • We had more guests on Quantum Software Talks Series on Twitch, with recordings uploaded to Youtube. 

  • We hosted Intro to QuTiP: A Quantum Toolbox in Python by Shahnawaz Ahmed and Intro to QuNetSim: A Software Framework for Quantum Networks by Stephen DiAdamo.

  • We hosted 3 research talks on Discord:

  • “Exponential Error Suppression for Near-Term Quantum Devices”, by Bálint Koczor.

  • Chen Wang, “Protecting a bosonic qubit with autonomous quantum error correction”, by Chen Wang.

  • AMA on gate tomography and randomized benchmarking, by Cassandra Granade.

  • Sarah from the Unitary Fund team gave an interview on quantum computing 

  • Andrea and Ryan spoke on our error-mitigating research at the APS March Meeting

  • 7 New Grants

  • To Goutam Tamvada and Douglas Stebila to develop VeriFrodo, an open-source package implementing a lattice-based quantum-resistant cryptographic algorithms in Jasmin within the Open Quantum Safe project.

  • To Owen Lockwood to develop a software package using classical deep reinforcement learning to improve quantum optimization, both for quantum simulations and hardware integration.

  • To Daniel Stilck França to develop a software package that will help benchmark the limitations of noisy quantum devices for solving optimization problems. [arXiv] [ QIP talk on the technique].

  • To Rhea Parekh and Stephen DiAdamo to further develop Interlin-q, a distributed quantum-enabled simulator integrated with QuNetSim.

  • To Dariusz Lasecki to build an open-source Python library that delivers easy-to-use high-quality pre-trained machine learning models to predict good QAOA starting parameters for selected classes of problems.

  • To Oscar Higgot, to continue developing and maintaining PyMatching, a Python package for decoding quantum error correcting codes with minimum-weight perfect matching (MWPM).

  • To Nicola Mosco, to develop HomodyneCT, a software package for medical diagnostics that uses a quantum-tomography-inspired technique for state reconstruction in order to reduce the radiation dose patients receive.

  • News from UF Projects

  • A new QuTiP related job posting: the position to join the QuTiP dev team can be fully remote for 2022!

  • QuTiP is also participating in Google Summer of Code 2021! Deadline for student applications is in one week.

  • https://quantumflytrap.com/ is growing with a new CNOT game and their first intern. They also posted a new blog post demoing interactive visualizations for qubits.

  • QRand has released v0.2.0 

  • QWorld continues to expand globally and now has chapters in 14 countries!

  • PyZX is used in new papers on the WolframPhysics project on foundations and in quantum machine learning

  • Qubit x Qubit hosted a diversity in quantum computing conference

  • Quantum Community Updates

  • QHack was held from February 17th, 2021.

  • QOSF completed the second cohort of their mentorship program. Several Unitary Fund projects were involved.

  • Qiskit has launched a mentorship program

  • Unitary Fund advisor Michal Stechly started a new podcast “Noisy Intermediate-Scale Podcast”.

  • IBM Quantum has released more open source software: qiskit metal for designing superconducting quantum hardware; active reset; and their new software roadmap.

  • QC40 will be held in May to celebrate 40 years of QC Research

Best wishes to all of you,

Will and the Unitary Fund Team