In the last month, I got to attend two conferences on “Quantum Computing” broadly speaking thanks to the PhD funds. Here’s my summary of what happened.
QUBITS Europe
QUBITS is the name of the D-Wave’s users group meeting, there’s a European chapter (in Milan this year) and an American chapter. The conference was focused on the news in D-Wave quantum computers as major upgrades have been announced this year, but it was also a way for the users to showcase their work.
The presentations held by companies that were showcasing their work with D-Wave were for the most part publicity stunts with little utility in scientific terms, while there were a couple of presentations by scholars of various research institutes across Europe that I found stimulating:
The trend that seemed to be confirmed is the use of these devices as high-performance optimizer with most of the performance bottlenecks coming from the sparse connectivity of the hardware. Overall it was a positive experience as I had a sense of what is going on in Europe regarding D-Wave and it was the occasion
to discuss some technical problems with knowledgeable people.
Unfortunately, I had no work to present myself but I’m looking forward to it at the next QUBITS.
Quantum Information and Measurement V (QIM)
The fifth edition of this international conference was based in Rome this year and it was a nice opportunity to look more broadly at the field of quantum information. In particular, there were a couple of poster presentations which were interesting (even from an engineering perspective) because they used simple Machine Learning techniques applied to quantum systems with good performance improvements on standard techniques used by physicists:
This time I could present a poster as well, mainly based on my last year’s work around quantum measurements. Here’s the link to my poster abstract, you can find in the references the full article that I’m referring to in this presentation:
https://www.osapublishing.org/abstract.cfm?uri=QIM-2019-F5A.25
Other than this, there were some of the big names in the field and it was inspiring to watch their presentations and to have a sense of where the research is heading in this field. Bonus point, the social dinner was hosted in an awesome restaurant on top of Capitoline Hill with a breathtaking view.
If you had the patience of reading this summary, thank you and I hope I’ll be able to write more of these in the next months.
Lorenzo Buffoni