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2.4.2020
Will Zeng

Unitary Fund Q1 2020 Update: new team members and new grants

Dear Unitary Fund community,

These are trying times for everyone and we send well wishes to all of you. Hopefully, we can brighten your day with a bit of good news from developments in the Unitary Fund community this quarter.  

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.

This quarter we greatly expanded the Unitary Fund team, welcoming the first members of our Unitary Labs group. We funded new projects and helped run the 2020 version of the quantum open source workshop at FOSDEM. You can read more about all these updates in the following links:

  • Unitary Labs. Our blog post on our new Unitary Labs research team: Nathan Shammah, Andrea Mari, and Ryan LaRose. We are grateful to the US Department of Energy and IBM for helping support our research work. We’re working on open source tools to make quantum programs more robust to noise. More on this to come.

  • New grants.

    • To Vincent Russo to support toqito, an open source Python toolkit for quantum information theory with extra functionality to study non-local games. [Github]

    • To Klementyna Jankiewicz and Piotr Migdal to develop widgets that embed visualizations of quantum states and ops into blog posts, interactive textbooks, and explorable explanations. These are extensions from their work on a new version of QuantumGame. [ Github]

    • Two other soon to be announced grants.

  • QuTiP. The Quantum Toolbox in Python is one of the most used and most useful quantum software packages out there. Further it is developed as an independent open source project. With Nathan, one of QuTiP’s lead developers, joining the Unitary Fund team, we are excited to support it. We’re starting by offering support to suggested projects that contribute to QuTiP. You can read more about these projects on our website.

  • FOSDEM 2020. We again partnered with the Quantum Open Source Foundation to run a quantum open source workshop at FOSDEM 2020. All the talks, including 5 by Unitary Fund grant winners, are available online here.

  • News from UF Projects.

    • Carlos Bravo-Prieto’s et al. paper, “Scaling of variational quantum circuit depth for condensed matter systems” was put on the arXiv. His was the first project ever funded by Unitary Fund!

    • QRack updated their benchmarks and demonstrate impressive performance. They also include some very interesting results on simulating supremacy-style circuits.

  • Q4Climate. We became early supporters of the Q4Climate initiative. 

Best wishes to all of you.

Be well,
Will and the Unitary Fund Team