Quantum computers are machines that are built on the principles of quantum mechanics. Unlike classical computers which rely on bits that can only exist in one of two states (0 or 1), quantum computers use quantum bits which can exist in multiple states at once. Because of this, quantum computers are expected to process algorithms and solve problems much faster than classical computers. Q# is a programming language created by Microsoft specifically for quantum computing.
In this instructor-led, live training, participants will learn the fundamentals of quantum computing and Q# as they step through the development of simple quantum programs.
By the end of this training, participants will be able to:
Install and configure Microsoft’s Quantum Development Kit.
Understand the concepts behind quantum computing.
Build, test, execute, and troubleshoot a quantum program using Q#, Visual Studio and a local quantum computing simulator.
Audience
Developers
Format of the course
Part lecture, part discussion, exercises and heavy hands-on practice
Note
To request a customized training for this course, please contact us to arrange.
Course Outline
Introduction to Quantum Computing
Quantum Computing vs. Classical Computing
Overview of Microsoft’s Quantum Development Kit
Q# Language and Compiler
Q# Standard Library
Local Quantum Machine Simulator
Quantum Trace Simulator
Visual Studio Extension
Setting Up the Quantum Development Environment
Installing and Configuring Microsoft’s Quantum Development Kit
Using the Q# Programming Language
The Type Model
Expressions
Statements
File Structures
Operations and Functions
Working with Qubits
Creating Your First Quantum Program with Q#
Setting Up a Quantum Solution and Project in Visual Studio
An understanding of software and hardware computing concepts.
An understanding of complex numbers and linear algebra.
Audience
Developers
Scientists
Engineers
Overview
Quantum computers are machines that are built on the principles of quantum mechanics. Unlike classical computers which rely on bits that can only exist in one of two states (0 or 1), quantum computers use quantum bits which can exist in multiple states at once. Quantum computers are expected to process algorithms and solve problems much faster than classical computers.
Cirq is a Python library for writing, manipulating, and optimizing quantum circuits and running them against quantum computers and simulators.
In this instructor-led, live training (onsite or remote), participants will learn the fundamentals of quantum computing as they step through the development of algorithms targeting quantum computers.
By the end of this training, participants will be able to:
Set up the necessary development environment to start creating quantum circuits.
Control gate behavior using the gate’s native counterpart.
Improve on quibit inaccuracies using Cirq.
Write and execute a quantum circuit to run against a NISQ based quantum computer simulator.
Format of the Course
Interactive lecture and discussion.
Lots of exercises and practice.
Hands-on implementation in a live-lab environment.
Course Customization Options
To request a customized training for this course, please contact us to arrange.
To learn more about Ciq Framework, please visit: https://github.com/quantumlib/Cirq
Course Outline
Introduction
Quantum Information Theory
The uncertainty theory
Superposition and entanglement
Subatomic particles
Overview of Classic Computers
Bits
Binary systems
Transistors
Quantum Computing
Topological codes
Circuit QED
Quibits
Understanding Quantum Computers and NISQ Processors
Algorithms for the NISQ Architecture
Overview of Cirq Framework
Overview of Quantum Development Kits
Setting Up the Quantum Development Environment
Cirq Data Structures and Syntax
Preparing the Quantum Machine Simulator
Case Study: Low Depth Quantum Algorithms for Quantum Chemistry Problems
No background in quantum computing, or quantum physics necessary.
No physics background necessary.
We cover A to Z of Quantum Computing!
Overview
Practical Quantum Computing: Live Online
Launch your high-tech career
This is a 10 hour instructor-led, live online training course. After your immersive training, you will be ready to start work as an entry level quantum computing developer.
By the end of this training, participants will be able to:
Run and test your quantum programs with the integrated IBM Q
Use Qiskit to create, compile, and execute quantum computing programs
Working with practical and advanced quantum algorithms such as QAOA
Recast real-world problems into an appropriatequantum computing language
Format of the Course
Interactive lecture and discussion.
Lots of exercises and practice.
Hands-on implementation in a live-lab environment.
Course Customization Options
To request a customized training for this course, please contact us to arrange.
Course Outline
Basic notions of Quantum Mechanics
Introduction to Quantum Computing
Quantum Gates and Quantum Circuits (Binary Quantum Gates)
Quantum Computation via Python and Qiskit
Practical Quantum Algorithm Design and Construction
Advanced Quantum Algorithm Implementations via Qiskit
Solving real world problems in diverse industries via IBM’s quantum computers
Knowledge of mathematical methods in probability and linear algebra
Comprehension of foundational computer science theories and algorithms
An understanding of elementary quantum physics concepts
Basic experience with quantum mechanics models and theories
Audience
Computer Scientists
Engineers
Overview
Quantum computing is the integration of quantum physics, mathematics, and computer science methods for the advancement of computational models. It applies two main quantum properties namely superposition and entanglement, which allows the development of quantum computers. Quantum computing incorporates these behaviors of quantum particles to execute computational technologies that are exponentially faster than classic computers.
This instructor-led, live training (online or onsite) is aimed at computer scientists and engineers who wish to understand the principles behind quantum computing and utilize them in developing algorithms for quantum computer implementations.
By the end of this training, participants will be able to:
Comprehend the fundamentals of quantum computing.
Understand and apply quantum physics concepts into computational methods.
Create algorithms for quantum computers.
Solve computational problems efficiently with quantum computers.
Integrate quantum behaviors into existing computational models.
Perceive the potential of quantum computing in the advancement of other technologies.
Format of the Course
Interactive lecture and discussion.
Lots of exercises and practice.
Hands-on implementation in a live-lab environment.
Course Customization Options
To request a customized training for this course, please contact us to arrange.
Course Outline
Introduction
Overview of Quantum Physics Theories Applied in Quantum Computing
Fundamentals of quantum superposition
Fundamentals of quantum entanglement
Mathematical foundations of quantum computing
Overview of Quantum Computing
Differentiating quantum computing and classical electronic computing
Integrating quantum behaviors into quantum computing
The Qubit
Implementing the Dirac notation
Computational basis measurements in quantum computing
Quantum circuits and quantum oracles
Working with Vectors and Matrices in Quantum Computing
Matrix multiplication using quantum physics
Conventions of tensor products
Applying Advanced Matrix Concepts to Quantum Computing
Overview of Quantum Computers and Quantum Simulators
The quantum hardware and its components
Running a quantum simulator
Executable quantum mechanisms in a quantum simulation
Performing quantum computations in a quantum computer
Working with Quantum Computing Models
Logic and functions of different quantum gates
Understanding superposition and entanglement effects on quantum gates
Utilizing Shor’s Algorithm and Quantum Computing Cryptography
Implementing Grover’s Algorithm in Quantum Computing
Estimating a Quantum Phase in a Quantum Computer
The quantum Fourier transform
Writing Basic Quantum Computing Algorithms and Programs for a Quantum Computer
Utilizing the right tools and language for quantum computing
Setting up quantum circuits and specifying quantum gates
Compiling and Running Quantum Algorithms and Programs in a Quantum Computer
Testing and Debugging Quantum Algorithms and Quantum Computer Programs
Identifying and Correcting Algorithm Errors Using Quantum Error Correction (QEC)
Overview of Quantum Computing Hardware and Architecture
Integrating Quantum Algorithms and Programs with the Quantum Hardware
Troubleshooting
Advancing Quantum Computing for Future Quantum Information Science Applications
Every week, the top AI labs globally — Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, etc. — release tons of new research work, tools, datasets, models, libraries and frameworks in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML).
Interestingly, they all seem to have picked a particular school of thought in deep learning. With time, this pattern is becoming more and more clear. For instance, Facebook AI Research (FAIR) has been championing self-supervised learning (SSL) for quite some time, alongside releasing relevant papers and tech related to computer vision, image, text, video, and audio understanding.
Even though many companies and research institutions seem to have their hands on every possible area within deep learning, a clear pattern is emerging. But, of course, all of them have their favourites. In this article, we will explore some of the recent work in their respective niche/popularised areas.
DeepMind
A subsidiary of Alphabet, DeepMind remains synonymous with reinforcement learning. From AlphaGo to MuZero and the recent AlphaFold, the company has been championing breakthroughs in reinforcement learning.
AlphaGo is a computer program to defeat a professional human Go player. It combines an advanced search tree with deep neural networks. These neural networks take a description of the Go board as input and process it through a number of different network layers containing millions of neuron-like connections. The way it works is — one neural network ‘policy network’ selects the next move to play, while the other neural network, called the ‘value network,’ predicts the winner of the game.
Taking the ideas one step further, MuZero matches the performance of AlphaZero on Go, chess and shogi, alongside mastering a range of visually complex Atari games, all without being told the rules of any game. Meanwhile, DeepMind’s AlphaFold, the latest proprietary algorithm, can predict the structure of proteins in a time-efficient way.
OpenAI
GPT-3 is one of the most talked-about transformer models globally. However, its creator OpenAI is not done yet. In a recent Q&A session, Sam Altman spoke about the soon to be launched language model GPT-4, which is expected to have 100 trillion parameters — 500x the size of GPT-3.
Besides GPT-4, Altman gave a sneak-peek into GPT-5 and said that it might pass the Turing test. Overall, OpenAI looks to achieve artificial general intelligence with its series of transformer models into new areas.
Today, GPT-3 competes with the likes of EleutherAI GPT-j, BAAI’s Wu Dao 2.0 and Google’s Switch Transformer, among others. Recently, OpenAI launched OpenAI Codex, an AI system that translates natural language into code. It is a descendant of GPT-3; its training data contains both natural language and billions of lines of source code from publicly available sources, including code in public GitHub repositories.
Facebook
Facebook is ubiquitous to self-supervised learning techniques across domains via fundamental, open scientific research. It looks to improve image, text, audio and video understanding systems in its products. Like its pretrained language model XLM, self-supervised learning is accelerating important applications at Facebook today — like proactive detection of hate speech. Further, its XLM-R, a model that leverages RoBERTa architecture, improves hate speech classifiers in multiple languages across Instagram and Facebook.
Facebook believes that self-supervised learning is the right path to human-level intelligence. It accelerates research in this area by sharing its latest work publicly and publishing at top conferences, alongside organising workshops and releasing libraries. Some of its recent work in self-supervised learning include VICReg, Textless NLP, DINO, etc.
Google
Google is one of the pioneers in automated machine learning (AutoML). It is advancing AutoML in highly diverse areas like time-series analysis and computer vision. Earlier this year, Google Brain researchers introduced a new way of programming AutoML based on symbolic programming called PyGlove. It is a general symbolic programming library for Python, used for implementing symbolic formulation of AutoML.
Some of its latest products in this area include Vertex AI, AutoML Video Intelligence, AutoML Natural Language, AutoML Translation, and AutoML Tables.
Apple
On-device machine learning comes with privacy challenges. To tackle the issue, Apple, in the last few years, has ventured into federated learning. For those unaware, federated learning is a decentralised form of machine learning. It was first introduced by Google researchers in 2016 in a paper titled, ‘Communication Efficient Learning of Deep Networks for Decentralized Data,’ but has been widely adopted by various players in the industry to ensure smooth training of machine learning models on edge, alongside maintaining the privacy and security of user data.
In 2019, Apple, in collaboration with Stanford University, released a research paper called ‘Protection Against Reconstruction and Its Applications in Private Federated Learning,” which showcased practicable approaches to large-scale locally private model training that were previously impossible. The research also touched upon theoretical and empirical ways to fit large-scale image classification and language models with little degradation in utility.
Check out other top research papers in federated learning here.
Apple designs all its products to protect user privacy and give them control of their data. Despite the setbacks, the tech giant is working on various innovative ways to offer privacy-focused products and apps by leveraging federated learning and decentralised alternative techniques.
Microsoft
Microsoft Research has become one of the number one AI labs globally, pioneering machine teaching research and technology in computer vision and speech analysis. It offers resources across the spectrum, including intelligence, systems, theory and other sciences.
Under intelligence, it covers research areas like artificial intelligence, computer vision, search and information retrieval, among others. In the systems, the team offers resources in quantum computing, data platforms and analytics, security, privacy and cryptography, and more. Currently, it has become a go-to platform for attending lecture series, sessions and workshops.
Earlier, Microsoft launched free machine learning for beginners to teach students the basics of machine learning. For this, Azure Cloud advocates and Microsoft student ambassador authors, contributors, and reviewers put together the lesson plan that uses pre-and-post lesson quizzes, infographics, sketch notes, and assignments to help students adhere to machine learning skills.
Amazon
Amazon has become one of the leading research hubs for transfer learning methods due to its exceptional work in the Alexa digital assistant. Since then, it has been pushing research in the transfer learning space incredibly, be it to transfer knowledge across different language models, techniques, or better machine translation.
There have been several research works implemented by Amazon, especially in transfer learning. For example, in January this year, Amazon researchers proposed ProtoDA, an efficient transfer learning for few-shot intent classification.
Check out more resources related to transfer learning from Amazon here.
IBM
While IBM pioneered technology in many machine learning areas, it lost a leadership position to other tech companies. For example, in the 1950s, Arthur Samuel of IBM developed a computer programme for playing checkers. Cut to the 2020s, IBM is pushing its research boundaries in quantum machine learning.
The company is now pioneering specialised hardware and building libraries of circuits to empower researchers, developers and businesses to tap into quantum as a service through the cloud, using preferred coding language and without the knowledge of quantum computing.
By 2023, IBM looks to offer entire families of pre-built runtimes across domains, callable from a cloud-based API, using various common development frameworks. It believes that it has already laid the foundations with quantum kernel and algorithm developers, which will help enterprise developers explore quantum computing models independently without having to think about quantum physics.
In other words, developers will have the freedom to enrich systems built in any cloud-native hybrid runtime, language, and programming framework or integrate quantum components simply into any business workflow.
Wrapping up
The article paints a bigger picture of where the research efforts of the big AI labs are heading. Overall, the research work in deep learning seems to be going in the right direction. Hopefully, the AI industry gets to reap the benefits sooner than later.
