Since its inception in June 1983, RIACS has conducted basic and applied research in computer science for the nation's aeronautics and space-related missions and programs. In 2012, USRA partnered with NASA and Google to found the Quantum Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (QuAIL): the space agency’s hub to evaluate the near term impact of quantum technologies.
The mission of RIACS quantum computing team is to advance the industry and the body of knowledge in quantum information related sciences, and to continue to provide to its partners the most qualified technical support to address hard challenges in applied computer science.
Today, USRA, Standard Charted Bank and D-Wave announced that U.S Universities and Non-profit institutions can submit propoals for use of the D-Wave 2000Q quantum annealer hosted at NASA Ames. Proposals are sought effective immediately and can gain free compute time to be used until December 2020. See the request for proposals for more details.
On August 26th the White House and DOE announced the award of 5 Quantum Information Sciences (QIS). Among the awards, the Superconducting Quantum Material and Systems Center (SQMS) at Fermilab and the Co-Design Center for Quantum Advantage C2QA will support the work of the NASA QuAIL team that is contributing with quantum algorithms and software techniques for simulation of materials, non-equilibrium condensed matter systems and quantum field theories. In SQMS, key-personnel include Dr. Eleanor Rieffel as chief scientist, Dr. Norman Tubman as co-lead of Algorithms, Simulation and Benchmarking, Dr. Venturelli as Co-Lead on the QIS Ecosystem Task Force, Dr. Stuart Hadfield and Dr. Salvatore Mandrà as Science Staff.
The monthly newsletter on Noisy-Intermediate-Scale Applied Quantum Computing is out, featuring papers from June 15 to July 14, 2020. We feature exclusively experiments that advance the field of applied quantum computing in existing hardware, or theoretical/engineering advances tightly connected to experimental realization in the near term. Read the latest newsletter here and subscribe here.
USRA and Standard Chartered Bank have partnered to collaboratively advance the state of art of computing technologies. In the collaboration, USRA will support fundamental academic research in quantum physics and artificial intelligence and Standard Chartered will focus on future commercial applications in the field of Finance. The two institutions have already worked together in the past on the application of the Reverse Quantum Annealing technique for combinatorial optimization problems (see paper) and plan to continue to investigate advanced quantum annealing techniques as well as other quantum-assisted heuristics relevant for machine learning.
This work by Parolini and Mossi studies energy matching in the Quantum Random Energy Model, a problem whose goal is to find multiple approximate solutions to an optimization problem once a given approximate solution is provided as input. A quantum process known as Population Transfer (PT) -- which uses resonant tunnelling in order to efficiently move through classically forbidden regions of configuration space -- is used in order to search for the target states. Through numerical simulations they find that PT optimality is achieved inside of the "bad metal" phase of the QREM close to the critical line of the Anderson transition. Comparison with classical heuristics for energy matching show a probabilistic oracle avantage in favour of PT, but the timescale necessary for the quantum dynamics to achieve such an optimal performance indicate that larger system sizes need to be explored in order to witness a genuine quantum advantage in this setting.