Actually, that will be next week. After this meeting I'm heading to the airport and flying off to Abu Dhabi. There, I'm working with New York University's Abu Dhabi campus, and the idea is to do a hackathon. It's called “Hackathon for Social Good in the Arab World”. I'm going as the quantum computing expert for it.
The hackathon brings in software engineers, computer scientists, people who want to build apps or APIs, just things that can go on your phone. The idea is to do what I think a lot of people at this meeting are caring about: to look at how is quantum computing going to fit into practical applications.
I help a lot in these things. Next week I'm a guest speaker, but also a mentor and enabler. The idea is that we want to take what quantum computing can do today.... And I just want to be a little bit clear here: Quantum computing is a long-term effort, but there's an area called “quantum-inspired computing”, which is where we say, what would a quantum computer be good at, and if we simulate a quantum computer today, could the benefits of the future come around today? Basically, thinking about what a quantum computer will do in the future inspires us to invent new algorithms today, like in optimization areas.
Part of what we're doing next week in Abu Dhabi is that I'll be looking at what the inspiration of quantum computing is doing to drive new algorithms and how to incorporate those new algorithms into apps. Then I'll bring in some of my students from Calgary, and we're doing things like basically flight management. We're working on problems like developing apps so that countries can minimize global temperature rise, and we call that the “objective function”. We're trying to find ways to say, given takeoffs and landings, altitudes, how do we minimize the global temperature rise, and we're doing it all with quantum-inspired computing.
Thanks for asking. That's what I love, and it just turns out that Abu Dhabi is the first place launching a hackathon of that type, so I'm helping them.