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7.7.2020
Will Zeng

Unitary Fund Q2 2020 Update: New advisory board and new grants

To the Unitary Fund community,

We’re excited to share new updates and developments from Unitary Fund this quarter. As many of us settle into working remotely, we’re grateful that our decentralized model has been robust. We’re especially glad to have been able to make a microgrant award to support a student in Hong Kong whose summer research support was lost when COVID shut down their university.

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 welcomed a fantastic expert advisory board, submitted our first research preprint from Unitary Labs, and made micro-grant awards to 5 new projects.

  • New from UF.

  • We welcomed our 15 member advisory board. They will be helping review grant applications, mentor projects, and advise on our research program. Thanks to all of them!

  • We posted our digital Zero-noise extrapolation paper to arXiv https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.10921

  • Will Zeng gave an invited talk on the Digital Zero-noise extrapolation work at QRE 2020.

  • Nathan Shammah spoke about our work at Le Lab Quantique and QWorld.

  • New Grants.

  • To Mark Shui Hu to further develop OpenSurfaceSim, a simulator package for surface codes. The grant will improve visualization methods and facilitate the collaboration of an open, modular platform for surface code simulations.

  • To Roger Luo to continue the development of Yao.jl, a software for solving practical problems in quantum computation research. The grant will support Yao’s new DSL compiler development, which includes an extensible DSL infrastructure, Julia-based frontend, Julia AST and QASM code generator, and a quantum circuit simplification infrastructure based on pattern matching.

  • To Dariusz Lasecki to build an open source QAOA library and examples using Q#.

  • To Muhammad Usman Farooq for a research project at the intersection of quantum information theory and quantum communication complexity supervised by Prof. Penghui Yao.

  • News from UF Projects.

  • https://github.com/Quantum-Game/bra-ket-vue released by Klementyna Jankiewicz and Piotr Migdal. This is working in the new beta release of https://quantumgame.io/. Check out also Piotr’s demo article in RMarkdown Distill.

  • QuTIP minor release 4.5.0 (January 2020) introduced the major update of the qip.noise module for pulse-level quantum circuits and several enhancements. The micro update 4.5.1 (May 2020) fixes several bugs.

  • Misc.

  • Quantum Computing Now is a new podcast with Ethan Hansen that’s great for folks new to the field and looking to learn more. With Unitary Fund’s support, Ethan has upgraded his podcasting setup and we encourage you to reach out if you’d be interested in being on the podcast. 

  • IEEE QC for renewable energy workshop.

  • IEEE Quantum Software Workshop - Several talks from UF folks and advisors in this session. Likely this will be virtual so hopefully many of you can attend!

Best wishes to all of you.

Be well,

Will and the Unitary Fund Team