It’s been a long, dense year and I hope you all are doing fine. Not only March 2021 marks one year from the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic escalation, but for me, it also marks the beginning of the adventure at Unitary Fund, the non-profit organization working to make the quantum tech ecosystem as open as possible. So, while I aim to keep this channel a personal one, I feel compelled to provide an update on what I’ve been busy with and some information on why I’m so passionate about it.
I cannot emphasize enough the effectiveness of the Unitary Fund approach to support the ecosystem, filling the gaps that are not yet addressed neither by academia or for profit ventures. An overview of Unitary Fund activities, pivoting around the micro-grant program, is given in the 2020 Annual Report.
I also suggest watching Will Zeng’s talk on this quantum jungle, with some strategies to thrive in its ecosystem.
Besides grants for smaller projects, Unitary Fund is also developing activities to support more established projects, such as QuTiP. Stay tuned for more updates on this space, most easily by joining Unitary Fund’s Discord server, a sort of open-source Slack for online communities.
Moreover, at Unitary Fund we’re building in-house Mitiq, an open-source toolkit to reduce the errors of current quantum computing devices, with techniques that use a mix of quantum sampling and classical inference. The research team is growing, and there are some opportunities to work with us, remotely. If you are interested, have a look here. (Talking about open positions, several opened at Chalmers’ WACQT and one for the QuTiP project at RIKEN.)
Stay updated on our work at Unitary Fund by subscribing to its Newsletter (quarterly updates on funded projects plus other major activities): Subscribe here
Needless to say, the quantum tech ecosystem overall has moved quite fast in this year and even more if I look back at when this newsletter started, in July 2017. Curated sources of timely information were not present back then. I now suggest having a look at the following resources:
News aggregators: The Quantum Daily, which even started a curated database à-la Crunchbase, Quantum Insider. Other information are collated on Twitter by various sources, as well as the Quantum Computing Report. Have a look and subscribe to NASA’s RIACS NISQ newsletter, which also accepts suggestions. Link
Podcasts: Ethan Hansen’s Quantum Computing Now and Michał Stechly’s Noisy-Intermediate Scale podcast.
Several video-series have surfaced online, fueled by the remote-only format of conferences. I suggest a couple: Unitary Fund’s Quantum Software Talks, hosted by Sarah Kaiser, delves into software packages nitty gritty:next up, next week, is Stephen Diadamo to speak about the quantum internet simulator QuNetSim. Zlatko Minev‘s Quantum Information Science Series. Simone De Liberato’s MIDI: Mid-infrared discussions.
In view of these available resources reducing the gap to up-to-date information, my quantum tech newsletter will change a bit in format, focusing more on my current interests, reducing its frequency.
This is a collection of my articles on quantum technology, part of my Quantum Tech Newsletter. You can read the original posts also on Medium:
- Quantum Jungle
- Gravitational Quantum Sensors
- Quantum Advantage
- Analog Computing
- Quantum Internet
- Quantum Games
- Open-Source Quantum Tech
- Quantum Machine Learning
- Space Quantum Communication
© Nathan Shammah — 2017 and beyond.
Nathan Shammah 