The Near Future in Quantum Innovation

When we address the question what will quantum like in the near future, a good strategy is to look at where the research and development money is going right now.

Many large companies are starting to invest time and money into quantum research. For example, automobile giants like Volkswagen, Audi, Porsche, Ducati, Daimler, and Ford are all investing in quantum Computing to enable and optimize strategic initiatives like algorithmic traffic navigation, chemical simulations, route optimization for self driving cars, battery technology and managing fuel consumption of commercial fleets. We will likely begin to see their efforts starting to pay off in the next few years.

Boston Consulting Group estimates that the two industries likely to be the first to show quantum progress will be Chemical Engineering and Machine Learning and AI. The Creative Destruction Lab (CDL) in Toronto now accepts quantum companies into its accelerator. At the top of their list of criteria for excepting a company is that it deals in chemical engineering or Machine Learning, but these are followed by material discovery, optimization & logistics, genomics and drug discovery, systems design, finance and security. However, in order to make those 'quantum leap' breakthroughs that we would all like to start seeing in enterprise, we need to cross a few technological bridges first.

The US Department of Energy just announced another $40 million in grant funding towards quantum computing research. Specifically they're looking to fund 1) Tools and resources to facilitate the use of diverse hardware technologies and architectures, 2) Research that forms bridges between quantum science and applied math and machine learning communities and 3) Basic research foundations in quantum algorithms and quantum computer science. This underscores the fact that we need to do some work in the foundations of quantum computing and quantum computing tools to make it both stable at the hardware level, and accessible to the broader community at the software level.

At Quantum Though, we build bridges between the quantum-present and quantum-future. Our approach is threefold. First, we deal and security - Post quantum cryptography to be specific. There is no doubt that quantum computers will soon be able to break all of our standard forms of encryption. Post quantum cryptography deals in new types of encryption and security methods that we can implement now in order to prepare for that day when quantum computers become a real threat to our enterprise security. Second we use hybrid approaches using both classical computing and quantum computing to optimize Machine Learning algorithms that exist now. Third, our brilliant researchers from diverse backgrounds - from quantum physics to high frequency trading - are currently building some of the quantum computing technologies that we've only dreamt of. At Quantum Thought, it is our objective to be the first to bring you the game changing enterprise technologies of the future.