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7.7.2021
Will Zeng

Unitary Fund Q2 2021 Update: UnitaryHACK, new projects, Mitiq's new features

To the Unitary Fund community,

The quantum technology ecosystem continues to accelerate its growth with new investments [1][2] [3] and advancing technology [4][5][6]. At Unitary Fund we’ve continued to grow our existing programs around microgrants and mitiq and found exciting success with new experiments like unitaryHack. Decentralized, open communities are impressing and we believe we’ll see the same in quantum.

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

  • Welcome Dan Strano and Vincent Russo to the Unitary Fund team! They’re working on a new (and so far un-announced) Unitary Labs project :)

  • About Mitiq: 

  • We released versions 0.8.0 through 0.9.3 of Mitiq, adding many new collaborators from the community. Thanks for your contributions!

  • We implemented Clifford Data Regression, a new error-mitigation technique [arXiv] and further deployed probabilistic error cancellation in the code base.

  • We hosted unitaryHACK, our first decentralized hackathon with bounties on 19 open source quantum projects:

  • >35 hackers; 64 contributions in two weeks

  • 50% of hackers new to Open Source, ~100% new to quantum open source

  • Special thanks to Xanadu, PASQAL, and DoraHacks for sponsoring extra bounties.

  • We reached almost 1,000 folks on the Unitary Fund Discord server

  • We’ve co-authored two new papers in quantum open source software: One on the new QuTiP’s features for pulse-level control of quantum circuits (arXiv:2105.09902) and one on Pulser, a new library to simulate Rydberg-atom quantum processors (arXiv:2104.15044).

  • We hosted Loïc Henriet in our Quantum Software Talks Series where he spoke about Pulser: an open source library for pulse simulation and design for neutral atoms

  • We spoke about Unitary Fund to many new communities! At OneQuantum Africa summit; QuBites; Codestories; Diversity in Quantum computing by QubitxQubit; Screaming in the cloud podcast; Portland Quantum Computing Meetup; Galileo Galilei Institute’s Summer School on Quantum Computing and Sensing

  • We had some great digital swag for unitaryHACK and a Mitiq logo designed by Frances Poblete!

  • 6 New Grants

  • To Lorenzo Buffoni, to develop SQWalk, A Stochastic Quantum Walk simulator based on QuTiP.

  • To Jonas Schwab and the ALF collaboration, to develop pyALF, the Python interface of the ALF project, a powerful and flexible package for Quantum Monte Carlo simulations of fermion systems.

  • To the teams at Orange Quantum Systems and Qblox, to develop Quantify Core, an open-source Python-based data acquisition and experiment control platform for quantum computing and solid-state physics experiments. It is built on QCoDeS and is a spiritual successor of PycQED.

  • To Reem Larabi to add more visualization improvements to the %debug tool in Q# by expanding its current set of controls.

  • To Diego Ariel Wisniacki, Martin Larocca, Emiliano Manuel Fortes to develop Krylov and K-GRAPE algorithms integrated with QuTiP. [arXiv]

  • To Alessandro Luongo and Armando Bellante to develop Quantumalgorithms.org an open-source web book collecting in an organized manner lectures notes around quantum algorithms for information processing, data analysis and machine learning.

  • News from UF Projects

  • The pyMatching project posted a new preprint and released a new version v0.3.0

  • Qubit by Qubit’s virtual quantum computing workshops reached over 2,000 middle and high school students in 18 different states in spring 2021. After the workshops, 85% of students wanted to learn more about quantum computing!

  • QuNetSim had their paper accepted in IEEE Transactions in Quantum Engineering and the Interlin-q project posted a new preprint.

  • QWorld hosted Quantum Science Days, their first QSilver quantum programming workshop. and added new QCousins: QRomania, QEgypt, QIrelend, and QZimbabwe. They are organizing a global summer school between July 26 and August 8 and a new edition of their internship program.

  • QuTiP’s quantum information processing and quantum programming features are updated and bundled in a stand-alone library, qutip-qip, whose v. 0.1 is released on PyPI.

  • Quantum Community Updates

  • IBM hosted QC40: The Physics of Computation, a virtual conference commemorating the 1981 event which kicked off the field and ran the 2021 IBM Quantum Challenge.

  • QHack, the quantum machine learning hackathon took place with open talks and a competitive hackathon

  • Pennylane versions 0.15 and 0.16 were released with the latter including unitaryHack contributions

  • The Quantum Coalition Hack was hosted by Yale and Stanford student

  • Qiskit Aqua refactored its application modules and the Qiskit runtime was launched.

  • IEEE Quantum Week announced its program for 2021 that includes workshops/tracks on open quantum hardware, quantum intermediate representations, and quantum workforce & society that Unitary Fund is helping organize.

Best wishes to all of you,

Will and the Unitary Fund Team