Community
← Back to Blog
5.2.2021
Will Zeng

Unitary Fund Q4 2020 Update: Quantum Software Talks, Mitiq updates, and more grants

To the Unitary Fund community,

Last year we ended the year by awarding 20 micro-grants, of which five in Q4. We’re proud of the impact the program is making. You can read more about our milestones and activities in the 2020 Annual Report. We have lots of updates: We collaborated with the QOSF to inaugurate and award the Wittek Quantum Prize for open-source software, we inaugurated the Quantum Software Talks series on Twitch, and now there are more than 270 members on our Discord server.

We’ve kept developing Mitiq, the quantum error mitigation toolkit in Python developed at Unitary Labs, now with six contributors from the quantum ecosystem.

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

  • Help wanted: We have put out an Administrator position job post: help us spread the word.

  • If you missed it, read our 2020 Annual Report here.

  • About Mitiq: 

  • We continue to develop the library, now at its 0.4.1 release on PyPI. You can join our community call on Fridays at 2:30pm ET on Discord ( discord.unitary.fund)

  • Here is a video of Ryan LaRose’s talk on Mitiq, including ongoing work to implement probabilistic error cancellation (PEC) 

  • We painstakingly reviewed nominations from a great pool of candidates and awarded the Wittek Quantum Prize for quantum open source software, in collaboration with QOSF. Congratulations to Roger Luo for winning, and for all the hard work they have put in to making the quantum open source ecosystem better! You can read the article from TQD on the Prize announcement and award. 

  • We began streaming the Quantum Software Talks Series on Twitch, with recordings uploaded to Youtube. We hosted Daniel Strano (Qrack), Alex McCaskey (QCOR).

  • Read about our collaboration with Pasqal on Pulser, a pulse-level control software library for atom-based quantum processors.

  • New Grants

  • To the QWorld team, a follow-up grant to be incorporated as a non-profit organization and step up their activities. [arXiv]

  • To the team at Qubit By Qubit, to develop courses and materials to educate a diverse ecosystem of open source quantum contributors.

  • To Pedro Rivero Ramírez for QRand, a multi-platform quantum random number generator library integrated with numpy.

  • To Jacob Miller for a PyTorch toolbox for matrix product state models.

  • To Rochisha Agarwal and Natansh Mathur to create a Quantum Machine Learning Textbook with integrated code and visualization.

  • News from UF Projects

  • qRAM project:

  • The package is officially available through Nuget.org 

  • Portland quantum computing meetup and at the University of Technology Sydney

  • QSurface (formerly OpenSurfaceSim) released

  • QWorld adds new chapters and incorporates as a non-profit

  • Quantum Flytrap launched by Piotr and Klem

  • Qrand launches first version

  • Quantum Community Updates

  • Podcast from Travis Scholten from the IEEE Quantum Week

  • QHack will be held from February 17th, 2021 

Best wishes to all of you,

Will and the Unitary Fund Team