Community
← Back to Blog
6.4.2022
Will Zeng

Unitary Fund Q1 2022 Update: New projects, advisors and supporters!

To the Unitary Fund community,

We’re excited to share our Q1 2022 quarterly update and highlight some of what UF’s been involved with so far this year.

We continue to award new grants, update Mitiq, and add ambassadors, advisors, technical staff and even new members to our program! For more detailed information, have a read at our key highlights below.

As the year progresses, we remain committed to growing our support towards the quantum open source ecosystem. Thank you all for your continued support and being a part of our journey. Make sure to follow our Discord, Twitter,LinkedIn, and our Community Calendar.

Upcoming event: our quantum open source hackathon unitaryHACK 2022: Register Now!

New from Unitary Fund

  • Welcome Misty Wahl to the Unitary Fund Team! Misty will be joining

    as Member of Technical Staff with a focus on Mitiq.

  • Two new Advisory Board members!

    • Amira Abbas, PhD

      student at the University of KwaZulu-Natal and Quantum Research Advocate at IBM

    • Stephen DiAdamo, Research Scientist at Cisco and author of the

      QuNetSim Python package (and fmr. Microgrant winner)

  • IBM and Accenture are some of our [[newest

    additions]{.ul}](https://unitary.fund/posts/2021-corporate-members.html) to our member program as Core Members. We thank IBM and Accenture and look forward to furthering our mission with their support.

  • Agnostiq has joined as a Unitary Fund

    [Supporting Member]{.ul}. We’re excited to work with Agnostiq and making a step towards creating a strong ecosystem, together with our other Supporting Members — Xanadu, IonQ, BCG, Pasqal, IQM, and DoraHacks.

  • Congratulations to Victory Omole for

    winning the [2021 Wittek Quantum Prize]{.ul} for his work on Google’s Cirq library and other open-source projects.

  • Join us every other Thursday for [[QiR community calls on our

    Discord]{.ul}](https://discord.gg/57nHcRS6CQ).

  • Mitiq

    • We released version 0.12 through 0.13 of Mitiq (full

      changelog):

      • The 0.12 release contains a considerable overhaul of the

        documentation organization and content (special thanks to Misty Wahl and Purva Thakre!), [check it out]{.ul}.

      • The 0.13 release is compatible with the latest Cirq version

        and contains GHZ circuit support (special thanks to Rahul Mistri). Two design documents, on learning-based PEC and digital dynamical decoupling were approved, thanks to Misty Wahl and Aaron Robertson. Thanks @astrojuanlu for useful suggestions about readthedocs, as we improved the HTML display of notebooks.

    • The [[2022 Mitiq

      roadmap]{.ul}](https://github.com/unitaryfund/mitiq/wiki#mitiq-2022-roadmap) has been discussed and approved

    • We added a [[Projects

      Ideas]{.ul}](https://github.com/unitaryfund/mitiq/wiki/Project-Ideas) section for students who may want to collaborate.

    • The Unitary Fund team, together with collaborators at Johns

      Hopkins, uploaded [a paper]{.ul} with a study on how to reduce the impact of correlated noise on zero noise extrapolation.

    • The Unitary Fund team uploaded [[a

      paper]{.ul}](https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.05489) showing the improvement of effective quantum volume with quantum error mitigation, using Mitiq.

New Grants

  • To Ayush Tambd, secondary

    school student and quantum enthusiast — for developing HODL language designed to make it easy and intuitive to write arithmetic, relational, and logical operations for quantum programs: GitHub arXiv

  • To Steven Thomson, Marie

    Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at Freie Universität Berlin — for creating a new quantum technology podcast aimed at highlighting the diverse range of people who work in quantum technology.

  • Unitary Fund became a sponsor for the [[Quantum

    Journal]{.ul}](https://quantum-journal.org/).

News from UF Projects

  • QuTiP has been accepted for Google Summer of Code 2022. Applications

    for students open April 4th and close April 19th. Check out [current Project Ideas]{.ul}.

  • Blog: [[Implementing a Variational Quantum Algorithms module in

    QuTiP]{.ul}](https://unitary.fund/posts/vqa_in_qutip.html)

    • QuTiP’s qutip-qip package consists of classes QubitCircuit and

      Gate, which simulate the dynamics of quantum circuits. For VQAs, these gates should be parameterized. In addition to the gate parameters, initialization options, which are fixed throughout the optimization process, will be easily defined in one object. For these purposes, we define two new classes, VQABlock and VQA, which are abstractions on Gate and QubitCircuit, respectively.

  • [[Two papers on quantum open source software

    projects]{.ul}](https://unitary.fund/posts/pulser_qutip.html) supported by the Unitary Fund were published in the open-access, community-driven journal Quantum.

    • The papers provide information on Pulser and qutip-qip, two

      Python packages for the pulse-level simulation of quantum programs on quantum computers.

  • Blog: [[OQuPy: Open Quantum Systems in

    Python]{.ul}](https://unitary.fund/posts/2022_oqupy.html): A Python 3 package to efficiently compute non-Markovian open quantum systems.

    • Additions to the OQuPy package with hopes that they would

      further attract new users who might find some use of these in their own research.

      • Calculation of bath correlations from system correlations

      • Non-perturbative simulation of a system coupled to multiple

        environments

Coming up next quarter:

  • unitaryHACK is returning in June 2022: [[Register

    Now!]{.ul}](https://airtable.com/shrJeycewBFqdot2B)

  • Boxi Li is giving a Quantum Software Talk on “*QuTiP qip:

    Pulse-level circuits simulation”* this Thursday April 7th at 6pm CET / 12pm ET, on Unitary Fund Twitch channel

  • QuTiP is participating in Google Summer of Code 2022: Applications

    are open until April 19th, find guidelines and project ideas here.

  • QCHack 2022 by the Quantum Coalition (Yale x MIT):

    quantumcoalition.io