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11.10.2021
Will Zeng

Unitary Fund Q3 2021 Update: New projects, the 2021 Wittek Prize and QuTiP community calls

To the Unitary Fund community,

As we reflect on this last quarter, the pace of developments in the field continues to impress. There have been large fundraising rounds for private (and now first public) companies as well as new government initiatives. At the end of the day, though, technologies and industries are built by people and communities. Just the kind that we are growing through Unitary Fund.

This last quarter has seen growth among discords, talks, and meetups as well as new grant funded projects. Do you want to help recognize someone who has made a big impact to the community? As a reminder the 2021 edition of the Wittek Prize, organized together with QOSF, is live, and nominations open. Check out the website – it’s awesome!

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

  • We’re looking for someone to join the Unitary Fund team for a part-time role in Marketing and Communications. Read more about the flexible hours, fully-remote role here. 

  • About Mitiq: 

  • We released versions 0.7.0 through 0.10.0 of mitiq adding many new collaborators from the community. Thanks for your contributions!

  • We released a new version of the Mitiq whitepaper describing the new techniques of probabilistics error cancellation and clifford data regression that have been added to the library.

  • The new Mitiq integration with Braket is featured on the AWS blog!

  • We co-authored a new paper on quantum error mitigation, further extending the applicability of the promising technique of probabilistic error cancellation to avoid tomographic overhead (arXiv:2108.02237).

  • We hosted Goutam Tamvada in our Quantum Software Talks Series where he spoke about VeriFrodo: an open source library implementing a post-quantum communication protocol in Jasmin.

  • We spoke about Unitary Fund to many new communities, including at Duke Quantum Computing Meetup and at the QEAM 21 workshop! 

  • New Grants

  • To Brian Shi to build Qdot, a Scala 3 library (QASM-transpiler) that allows Scala/Java developers to write native quantum/hybrid programs.

  • To Gerald E. Fux and Dominic Gribben from the TEMPO collaboration to develop OQuPy, an open source python package for simulating non-Markovian open quantum systems using tensor network techniques. In particular, the grant will enable adding two new features: studying the role of environment correlation functions through observables of the system and of multiple environments coupled to a single system.

  • To Utkarsh Azad and Animesh Sinha to build a visualization tool called qLEET for exploring loss landscapes, expressibility, entangling capacity and trainability for noisy, parameterized quantum circuits.

  • To Danny Samuel, to improve and extend the performance of variational quantum algorithms with error mitigation, benchmarking them with mirror circuits.

  • News from UF Projects

  • QuTiP 10-year anniversary was held on Unitary Fund’s Discord. Blog post here. Slides here.

  • Quantum Flytrap completed a seed round of VC investment and participated in the CDL Quantum Bootcamp. They also started working with another UF project Qubit by Qubit who have started using their Virtual Lab (with constantly expanding functionalities) for their courses.

  • The interlin-q project will be presenting at the SC21 conference in November and an extended writeup will appear in the conference proceedings in IEEE

  • QWorld organized their internship program, first global and online summer school with 675 graduates, and have started their first graduate-level online course on quantum computing and programming.

  • Quantum Community Updates

  • We’re organizing with the QOSF the 2021 edition of the Wittek Prize. Nominate someone here. The prize consists of $4,000 awarded to an outstanding contributor to the quantum open source community. It will be announced at the end of the year. 

  • We’re hosting a monthly Quantum Software Meetup with the folks from QOSF, on Gather Town. It’s an informal meetup to discuss new technologies, share resources, and learn from projects’ updates. https://unitary.fund/meetup.html

  • We’re involved in organizing two workshops within IEEE Quantum Week (October 18-22, 2021): One on Quantum Intermediate Representation and one on Open Quantum Hardware. Sign up to join.

  • We’re hosting the QuTiP community Call quarterly on the Unitary Fund Discord server. The next call is on October 27th, 2021, at 2pm CET featuring three talks on the 2021 Google Summer of Code projects (Tensorflow data layer; CuPy data layer; Unitary decomposition to universal gates). Save the Community Calendar event in your agenda.

  • Pennylane has begun hosting their regular community calls on the Unitary Fund discord.

  • There is a new call for papers in Research Topic in Frontiers of Physics on “Programming Physical Quantum Systems: Methods, Applications, Languages and Compilers”

Best wishes to all of you,

Will and the Unitary Fund Team