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A federal court has temporarily blocked a steep increase in fees for such services as citizenship and asylum application that was set to take effect Friday. Thats good news for migrants, but it poses a challenge for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, which gets almost all its budget from fees for services. (Photo by University of Findlay/Creative Commons)

WASHINGTON A federal judge late Tuesday blocked a steep increase in application fees set to take effect Friday for people seeking U.S. citizenship, an increase that advocates feared would have locked many immigrants out.

U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White said that U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services did not follow proper procedures when it ordered the higher fees. He also said the two men running USCIS and its parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security, did not have the authority to approve the increases because both men serve in acting roles.

Arizona advocates welcomed the courts action, saying the increases would have almost doubled the cost of naturalization, from $650 to as much as $1,170, putting the cost of citizenship out of reach for many.

These community members are landscapers and they clean houses, so theyre not in the high-income bracket, said Petra Falcon, executive director of Promise Arizona. Applying for citizenship is a luxury.

A USCIS spokesperson said in an email that the agency is reviewing the ruling on the fee rule and has no further comment at this time.

While the ruling helps migrants in the short term, it could have long-term implications for the agency, which draws almost all of its budget from fees and currently faces a $1 billion shortfall.

Migration Policy Institute researcher Sarah Pierce said the ruling is a win for USCIS customers people seeking permanent residency, work permits and naturalization, among other services.

But of course theres a lot of concerns about USCISs budgetary problems, Pierce said.

Migration Policy Institute said fees were last raised in 2016, when the cost for a non-military immigrant to apply for citizenship was set at $650.

The new fees that were set to take effect Friday would have raised citizenship application fees to between $1,150 and $1,170. Asylum seekers would have had to pay a $50 fee previously covered by other application charges and the cost of suspending a deportation would have grown more than five times.

When the new fees were proposed on July 31, USCIS said the increases were in line with previous years when the agency set a weighted average increase of 20% to help recover its operational costs. The July 31 statement said revenue from the fee increases would go toward increased costs to adjudicate immigration benefit requests, detect and deter immigration fraud, and thoroughly vet applicants.

Ira Mehlman, the media director for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, disagreed with the courts ruling that blocked the increase, saying USCIS should be able to charge what it needs to keep operating.

In order to be able to keep the agency afloat they needed to have the people who are directly using the services pay for the cost of maintaining this organization, Mehlman said.

But the agencys budget deficit has only become an issue in recent years, Pierce said, as business has declined and it has invested more in fraud detection and enforcement.

Applications to the agency, and thats fees to the agency, have significantly decreased over the last two years, Pierce said. In addition to that while their (USCIS) income was decreasing, their costs were increasing.

Pierce said the agency has been pushing austerity measures to cut costs or raise prices on customers moves that Falcon said targets poor immigrants and keeps them from becoming citizens. It would also increase the burden on nonprofit organizations like hers that may provide financial help to those seeking citizenship.

But that means were going to have to step up and raise money to support the people who normally would be afforded a waiver of application fees, Falcon said.

In August, USCIS made drastic cuts to its services to avoid furloughs for nearly 70% of its workforce.

Theres a good chance that this could be the final straw that pushes USCIS over the edge and make them go through the furlough that they have threatened twice before this year, Pierce said of the court ruling.

Theres another element of the ruling that could affect the agency, said Ilya Shapiro, an expert at the Cato Institute who wrote a brief opposing the fee increases: Its questioning of the authority of acting USCIS Director Ken Cuccinelli and acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf.

A Government Accountability Office report in August found that Wolf and Cuccinelli are serving improperly because their appointments violated the laws governing federal nominations.

Shapiro said that makes it not a fees case, its a government structure case. Because their appointments were not made as required by law, their exercise of authority under the relevant immigration laws was improper as well.

That could have larger consequences for Trump administration immigration policy, Pierce said.

If other judges agree with this judge, then that could mean we have a domino effect of a series of decisions that unravel a lot of the Trump administration immigration policies, she said. It could be the start of a really significant and interesting trend.

The ruling came one day before the Senate Homeland Security Committee voted 6-3 to send Wolfs nomination to the full Senate. The party-line vote came more than a year after Trump nominated Wolf.

Shapiro said Wolf will likely win confirmation, which could make Whites ruling moot. At least until the next election.

Chad Wolf and maybe even Ken Cuccinelli will be approved by the Senate and then they can start the process of reimposing the fees again, Shapiro said. Ultimately this will be decided by whether the Trump administration is reelected or not.

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Judge halts fee hike that would have nearly doubled cost of citizenship - Cronkite News

KNKX's Take the Mic and South Seattle Emerald present Election 2020 - The Youth Vote: A conversation about leadership, ethics and values and how they factor into choosing a candidate, a free Zoom event on October 14 at 4 p.m. PT. The event will be hosted by KNKX News Director Florangela Davila and South Seattle Emerald Editor-in-Chief/Publisher Marcus Harrison Green.REGISTER HERE.

Young people make up a projected 37% of the 2020 electorate, yet historically they vote less than other age groups. Will it be different this time? The pandemic crisis and the call for racial justice and institutional changes are top concerns as we move closer to this high stakes election. Ethics and values also underpin our decisions. This virtual event aims to bring together first-time and new voters with older adults with a track record of civic leadership to discuss a number of issues through the lens of beliefs and values, touching on things like:

Because this is leading up to the general election, we want to frame this conversation around the power to change systems for the greater good and how that ties in with being an informed voter.

The six young interviewers will ask the four speakers questions relating to the themes of conflict/failure, challenges, accountability, transparency, priorities and representation, with the speakers drawing on their personal and professional experiences; and offering examples of how they have faced challenging situations and how that speaks to leadership and community building.

Speakers

Gary Locke - As Governor of Washington State (the first Chinese American to be elected governor in United States history and the first Asian American governor on the mainland), U.S. Secretary of Commerce, and U.S. Ambassador to China, Gary Locke has been a leader in the areas of education, employment, trade, health care, human rights, immigration reform, privacy, and the environment. Currently, Gary Locke serves as the interim president of Bellevue College, which is the third largest higher education institution in Washington State serving nearly 30,000 students annually.

Victoria Woodards - Victoria Woodards has called the City of Destiny her home for nearly her entire life. She is a proud graduate of Tacomas Lincoln High School and served as a soldier in the United States Army. Before becoming Mayor of Tacoma in 2018, she served for seven years as an at-large member of the City Council. During that time, she launched the Citys Equity and Empowerment initiative which led to the establishment of its Office of Equity and Human Rights. She spearheaded the Citys Project PEACE initiative which bridged community members with the Tacoma Police Department and has worked to more fully engage the City's youth in community decisions that impact them every day, by expanding Student Government Day and establishing the Mayor's Youth Commission of Tacoma..

TraeAnna Holiday - TraeAnna Holiday is a true Seattleite who has watched her city change in many ways. She took her creative passion to Howard University, where she studied theater management in her first year of college. Then through the communications program at UW Tacoma, she began to understand her value in the field; always wanting to tell the stories she saw before her. In a Communities in Economics course, she learned about the academic version of displacement- gentrification. Through studying abroad and being displaced by gentrification, she's now fueled to tell her neighborhood's story through film and education while working on the solutions. Working with Africatown Community Land Trust and producing content with Converge Media are two of the ways shes begun to do just that. As a steward of community with a passion for storytelling, she brings her ideals to life and strives to help others do the same.

Michael Liang Since 2018, Michael has been Program Director of Spaceworks, with the aim of making Tacoma culturally vibrant and economically strong by providing space, training and resources for artists and creative entrepreneurs. Prior to that, he spent ten years as a designer and creative leader with the National Park Service. Michael has a B.F.A. in art and design from the University of Michigan, a certificate in natural science illustration from the University of Washington, and is currently finishing his M.S. in Education. He is passionate about building community and tapping into the transformative power of the arts for social good.

Young Interviewers

Bitaniya Giday, age 17, is the 2020-2021 Seattle Youth Poet Laureate. She is a first-generation Ethiopian American residing in Seattle. Her writing explores the nuances of womanhood and blackness, as she reflects upon her familys path of immigration across the world. She hopes to restore and safeguard the past, present, and future histories of her people through traditional storytelling and poetry.

Alicia Ing, age 18, is a freshman at the University of Washington, pursuing her studies in International Business and Diversity. Alicia has been active in community advocacy and leadership for over four years, and currently works as the Program Coordinator for the Seattle-based nonprofit Hey Mentor.

Mia Dabney, age 16, is in the 11th grade at Cleveland High School in Seattle, and is a youth council member for Skyway Youth Network Collaborative. She is currently working with the NAACP youth council to bring ethnic studies to the Seattle School District. Mia says, I believe changes will come if we continue to rise up together and value and respect each others differences.

Brooklyn Hose, age 18, graduated from Curtis Senior High School and is currently a student enrolled at the University of Washington with an interest in either a major in English or Business and a minor in Ethnic Studies. She is a local artist in the Tacoma community and emphasizes through her work the importance of empowering the voices of the underrepresented and marginalized.

Dylan Tran, age 22, is a full-time educator at Lincoln High School in his hometown of Tacoma, Washington. He is a child of Southeast Asian refugees and a graduate of Lincoln High School and the University of Washington.

Maeve Glackin-Coley, age 17, is currently a junior at Stadium High School in Tacoma. Shes interested in social justice, philanthropy, painting, and skiing. Maeve is a member of Greater Tacoma Community Foundations Youth Philanthropy Board and the Tacoma Mayors Education Youth Committee.

Event Hosts

Florangela Davila has been the News Director at KNKX since 2019. She spent 14 years working in both news and features at The Seattle Times, earning local, regional and national awards. As the managing editor at Crosscut/KCTS9, she helped transform the newsroom, driving online and broadcast coverage about immigration, equity and the arts; she hosted the TV news segment Crosscut Now; and she chaired the organization's Race and Equity Committee. A former faculty member in the Department of Communications at the University of Washington, she also worked in communications at Forterra, an environmental nonprofit where she curated and produced the Ampersand stage show. She has a B.A. in both Political Science and French from University of California-Berkeley and a Master's in Journalism from Columbia University. She got her start in public radio as a freelancer at KPLU in 2008.

Marcus Harrison Green is the publisher of the South Seattle Emerald, and a columnist with The Seattle Times. Growing up in South Seattle, he experienced first-hand the neglect of news coverage in the area by local media, which taught him the value of narratives. After an unfulfilling stint working for a Los Angeles based hedge-fund in his twenties, Marcus returned to his community determined to tell its true story, which led him to found the South Seattle Emerald. He was named one of Seattle's most influential people by Seattle Magazine in 2016.

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Join Us For Election 2020 - The Youth Vote Event - knkx.org

Had Amendment 3 the proposed Constitutional amendment that promises to tear down Floridas political primaries and build them anew been the law in 2018, the general election candidates for governor that year arguably might have been two Republicans.

The Democratic candidate, Andrew Gillum, would already have been eliminated.

We can explain:

The amendment, if approved by 60 percent or more of the voters on Nov. 3, would throw open Floridas primary elections to the states nearly 3.7 million voters who arent affiliated with any party.

Significantly, it also would throw candidates for any office into one pool for voters to select from, sending the top two vote-getters into the general election, regardless of their party. Meaning that the general election could involve two Republicans or two Democrats.

Its called a top two or jungle primary and would apply to elections for governor, the Florida Cabinet, and the Legislature.

Republican Ron DeSantis won 916,298 votes in the 2018 GOP primary. Republican Adam Putnam won 592,518. Gillum won 522,164 in his partys primary. Gillum might have been finished even before his narrow loss to DeSantis in the general election that year.

Of course, thats one scenario that opponents of the proposal have been highlighting supporters of Amendment 3 note that it doesnt account for the no-party-affiliation voters who they predict would flock to the primaries if allowed.

And the amendment is all about bringing those voters into the candidate selection process, where the sponsors hope they will help provide a cooling influence in a hot political environment that promotes extremism and polarization.

Supercharged rhetoric and raw meat

Glenn Burhans Jr., chairman of the sponsoring organization, All Voters Vote, notes that, between 1990 and now, non-affilated voters have expanded their share of the electorate from about 7 percent to 26 percent.

Voters are rejecting the two major parties because of the political divisiveness, because of rhetoric that is supercharged, highly heated, raw meat to the extreme ends of both parties. The vast majority of Americans are tired of that, Burhans said in a telephone interview.

As a consequence, things are not getting done by government, things that really need to be addressed, he said. When youve got nearly one third of Florida voters shut out of the process, how can our government truly be reflective of and responsive to the diversity of Floridas voters? I dont think it can be.

Florida is one of 16 states that hold closed primaries, in which only registered members of a party may help select its nominees.

Another 15 states hold open primaries, in which any voter may vote in any partys primary in other words, voters may cross party lines. Additional states use mixed systems and four states California, Louisiana, Nebraska, and Washington deploy the top two system.

At All Voters Vote, we are committed to the proposition that every voter in Florida should have the right to cast a meaningful ballot, the committee says on its website.

The committee has been raising money since March 2015, with its first big donation of $25,000 coming from Burhans law firm, Stearns Weaver Miller Weissler Alhadeff & Sitterson, which went on to invest heavily in the campaign.(Burhans, by the way, is the registered agent for Gillums Forward Florida political committee.)

The really big money, though, has come from Miguel Mike Fernandez, billionaire chairman of MBF Healthcare Partners L.P., a Coral Gables hedge fund that operates in the health care sector. Hes contributed nearly $6.8 million from his own pocket as well as family and trust accounts, according to Florida Division of Elections records.

Fernandez, a former major GOP fundraiser who left that party following Donald Trumps election, and who also backs immigration reform, didnt respond to requests for comment. He told the Miami Herald in 2018: I believe our nations founding principles provide that all who register should be able to vote. While three-quarters of all Americans support immigration reform, this wish is not represented by the majority of those currently in public office.

The Dems and GOP wanted the amendment kicked off

Attorney General Ashley Moody, a Republican, urged the Florida Supreme Court to kick the amendment off the ballot. The Florida Democratic Party and the Republican Party of Florida supported her in that request.

Among other complaints, the GOP argues the measure would freeze grass-roots Republicans out of the candidate selection process and will charge taxpayers millions to make us vote like they do in liberal states like California and Washington.

We support the democratic process and a system that gives voters more opportunities to choose a candidate that reflects their values. This ballot initiative would do the opposite, said Democratic chairwoman Terrie Rizzo has said. A proposal which eliminates the chance for a Democrat to make the ballot is not democratic.

Arguments Moody filed with the court raised two main points. One is that the ballot language would confuse voters used to Floridas established partisan primaries. The second is that the amendment would still allow parties to nominate candidates to participate in the top-two primary, but doesnt explain how that would work or ensure rank-and-file party members may participate.

The court disagreed in a ruling handed down in March. The majority noted that its review is restricted to determining whether the ballot language is clear, and the justices concluded that it is; and whether sponsors engaged in logrolling (assembling multiple purposes into one initiative). Again, the justices concluded they did not.

The minority vote

Other opponents include the Florida Legislative Black Caucus, which argues it would dilute the minority and progressive votes. If you are for Amendment 3, you are not for the minority community period, Audrey Gibson of Jacksonville, who leads the Senate Democratic caucus, said during a news conference in early September, according to a report in the Tallahassee Democrat.

The reason is that white non-aligned voters could flood the polls in districts now dominated by Black Democratic voters, caucus members explained. The district might still produce a Democratic officeholder, but he or she might not be Black.

Former House member Sean Shaw, the 2018 Democratic nominee for attorney general, argued that although a few minority House members represent predominantly white districts, none do in the Senate.

When you diminish the power of the Black electorate, you will necessarily, as a direct consequence of that, have less Black state senators, he said.

Burhans counters that, of the independent voters in Florida, who cannot now participate in party primaries, 1 million are minorities.

Whats the message were sending to those voters? Unless you join a political party youre vote doesnt matter? Your voice doesnt count? Thats not right. Its not fair, he said. These are people who are paying taxes to fund the elections that theyre blocked from participating in.

Still, concern about dilution of the minority vote persuaded the League of Women Voters of Florida to come out against this amendments language, notwithtstanding that organizations overall support for opening up the primary system.

It is our belief that top-two open primaries would have a strong adverse impact on African-American representation in Florida, the League says in a written statement posted on its website. The League of Women Voters of Florida is very much in support of open primaries and would wholeheartedly support this measure if it were not tied to top two.

The ACLU of Florida came out against the measure on Thursday, citing the effect on minority voters and the possibility that party members might lose the chance to vote for one of their own in general elections.

The organization added: The measure also raises First Amendment concerns by hindering political dissent and a political partys freedom of association, as well as the ability to select its candidates and messaging.

Here is the text of Amendment 3:

All Voters Vote in Primary Elections for State Legislature, Governor, and Cabinet

Allows all registered voters to vote in primaries for state legislature, governor, and cabinet regardless of political party affiliation. All candidates for an office, including party nominated candidates, appear on the same primary ballot.

Two highest vote getters advance to general election. If only two candidates qualify, no primary is held and winner is determined in general election. Candidates party affiliation may appear on ballot as provided by law. Effective January 1, 2024.

It is probable that the proposed amendment will result in additional local government costs to conduct elections in Florida. The Financial Impact Estimating Conference projects that the combined costs across counties will range from $5.2 million to $5.8 million for each of the first three election cycles occurring in even-numbered years after the amendments effective date, with the costs for each of the intervening years dropping to less than $450,000.

With respect to state costs for oversight, the additional costs for administering elections are expected to be minimal. Further, there are no revenues linked to voting in Florida. Since there is no impact on state costs or revenues, there will be no impact on the states budget. While the proposed amendment will result in an increase in local expenditures, this change is expected to be below the threshold that would produce a statewide economic impact.

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Should all voters participate in the primaries regardless of political parties? - Florida Phoenix

A fast-growing UK startup is quietly making strides in the promising field of quantum photonics. Cambridge-based company Nu Quantum is building devices that can emit and detect quantum particles of light, called single photons. With a freshly secured 2.1 million ($2.71 million) seed investment, these devices could one day underpin sophisticated quantum photonic systems, for applications ranging from quantum communications to quantum computing.

The company is developing high-performance light-emitting and light-detecting components, which operate at the single-photon level and at ambient temperature, and is building a business based on the combination of quantum optics, semiconductor photonics, and information theory, spun out of the University of Cambridge after eight years of research at the Cavendish Laboratory.

"Any quantum photonic system will start with a source of single photons, and end with a detector of single photons," Carmen Palacios-Berraquero, the CEO of Nu Quantum, tells ZDNet. "These technologies are different things, but we are bringing them together as two ends of a system. Being able to controllably do that is our main focus."

SEE: Hiring Kit: Computer Hardware Engineer (TechRepublic Premium)

As Palacios-Berraquero stresses, even generating single quantum particles of light is very technically demanding.

In fact, even the few quantum computers that exist today, which were designed by companies such as Google and IBM, rely on the quantum states of matter, rather than light. In other words, the superconducting qubits that can be found in those tech giants' devices rely on electrons, not photons.

Yet the superconducting qubits found in current quantum computers are, famously, very unstable. The devices have to operate in temperatures colder than those found in deep space to function, because thermal vibrations can cause qubits to fall from their quantum state. On top of impracticality, this also means that it is a huge challenge to scale up the number of qubits in the computer.

A photonic quantum computer could have huge advantages over its matter-based counterpart. Photons are much less prone to interact with their environment, which means they can retain their quantum state for much longer and over long distances. A photonic quantum computer could, in theory, operate at room temperature and as a result, scale up much faster.

The whole challenge comes from creating the first quantum photon, explains Palacios-Berraquero. "Being able to emit one photon at a time is a ground-breaking achievement. In fact, it has become the Holy Grail of quantum optics."

"But I worked on generating single photons for my PhD. That's the IP I brought to the table."

Carmen Palacios-Berraquero and the Nu Quantum team just secured a 2.1 million ($2.71 million) seed investment.

Combined with improved technologies in the fields of nanoscale semi-conductor fabrication, Palacios-Berraquero and her team set off to crack the single-photon generation problem.

Nu Quantum's products come in the form of two little boxes: the first one generates the single photons that can be used to build quantum systems for various applications, and the other measures the quantum signals emitted by the first one. The technology, maintains the startup CEO, is bringing quantum one step closer to commercialization and adoption.

"Between the source and the detector of single photons, many things can happen, from the simplest to the most complex," explains Palacios-Berraquero. "The most complex one being a photonic quantum computer, in which you have thousands of photons on one side and thousands of detectors on the other. And in the middle, of course, you have gates, and entanglement, and and, and and. But that's the most complex example."

A photonic quantum computer is still a very long-term ambition of the startup CEO. A simpler application, which Nu Quantum is already working on delivering commercially with the UK's National Physical Laboratory, is quantum random number generation a technology that can significantly boost the security of cryptographic keys that secure data.

The keys that are currently used to encrypt the data exchanged between two parties are generated thanks to classical algorithms. Classical computing is deterministic: a given input will always produce the same output, meaning that complete randomness is fundamentally impossible. As a result, classical algorithms are predictable to an extent. In cryptography, this means that security keys can be cracked fairly easily, given sufficient computing power.

Not so much with quantum. A fundamental property of quantum photons is that they behave randomly: for example, if a single photon is sent down a path that separates in two ways, there is no way of knowing deterministically which way the particle will choose to go through.

SEE: What is the quantum internet? Everything you need to know about the weird future of quantum networks

The technology that Nu Quantum is developing with the National Physical Laboratory, therefore, consists of a source of single photons, two detectors, and a two-way path linking the three devices. "If we say the right detector is a 1, and the left detector is a 0, you end up with a string of numbers that's totally random," says Palacios-Berraquero. "The more random, the more unpredictable the key is, and the more secure the encryption."

Nu Quantum is now focusing on commercializing quantum random number generation, but the objective is to build up systems that are increasingly complex as the technology improves. Palacios-Berraquero expects that in four or five years, the company will be able to start focusing on the next step.

One day, she hopes, Nu Quantum's devices could be used to connect quantum devices in a quantum internet a decade-long project contemplated by scientists in the US, the EU, and China, which would tap the laws of quantum mechanics to almost literally teleport some quantum information from one quantum device to the next. Doing so is likely to require single photons to be generated and distributed between senders and receivers, because of the light particles' capacity to travel longer distances.

In the shorter term, the startup will be focusing on investing the seed money it has just raised. On the radar, is a brand-new lab and headquarters in Cambridge, and tripling the size of the team with a recruitment drive for scientists, product team members and business functions.

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Quantum computing: Photon startup lights up the future of computers and cryptography - ZDNet

LES CLAYES, France, Oct. 5 2020 The NExt ApplicationS of Quantum Computing (NEASQC) project brings together a multidisciplinary consortium of academic and industry experts in Quantum Computing, High Performance Computing, Artificial Intelligence, chemistry and energy management. NEASQC aims to demonstrate that, though the millions of qubits that will guarantee fully fault-tolerant quantum computing are still far away, there are practical use cases for the NISQ (Noisy Intermediate- Scale Quantum) devices that will be available in the near future. NISQ computing can deliver significant advantages when running certain applications, thus bringing game-changing benefits to users, and particularly industrial users.

The NEASQC consortium has chosen 9 NISQ-compatible industrial and financial use-cases, and will develop new quantum software techniques to solve those use-cases with a practical quantum advantage.

The ultimate ambition of NEASQC is to encourage European user communities to investigate NISQ quantum computing. For this purpose, the project consortium will define and make available a complete and common toolset that new industrial actors can use to start their own practical investigation and share their results. explained Cyril Allouche, Fellow, VP, Head of the Atos Quantum R&D Program at Atos, and coordinator of the NEASQC project.

NEASQC also aims to build a much-needed bridge between Quantum Computing hardware activities, particularly those of the European Quantum Flagship, and the end-user community. Even more than in classical IT, NISQ computing demands a strong cooperation between hardware teams and software users. We expect our work in use cases will provide strong directions for the development of NISQ machines, what will be very valuable to the nascent quantum hardware industry.

The NEASQC project gathers 12 organisations from 8 European countries and is coordinated by Atos. The 4-year project has a budget of 4.67 million Euros, funded by the European Commission under the Horizon 2020 programme. It was launched on 5 October with an online kick-off meeting that virtually gathered representatives of all consortium members.

NEASQC objectives

1. Develop 9 industrial and financial use cases with a practical quantum advantage for NISQ machines.2. Develop open source NISQ programming libraries for industrial use cases, with a view to facilitate quantum computing experimentation for new users.3. Build and share knowledge with a strong user community dedicated to industrial NISQ applications.4. Develop software stacks and benchmarks for the Quantum Technology Flagship

About the NEASQC project

The NEASQC project brings together academic experts and industrial end-users to investigate and develop a new breed of Quantum-enabled applications that can take advantage of NISQ systems in the near future. NEASQC is use-case driven, addressing practical problems such as drug discovery, CO2 capture, energy management, natural language processing, breast cancer detection, probabilistic risk assessment for energy infrastructures, or hydrocarbon well optimisation. NEASQC aims to initiate an active European community around NISQ Quantum Computing by providing a common toolset that will attract new industrial users.

The NEASQC project is run by a European consortium that includes:

NEASQC is one of the projects selected within the second wave of Quantum Flagship projects and will be included with the Quantum Computing Application Area. This project has received funding from the European Unions Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 951821

The Quantum Flagship was launched in 2018 as one of the largest and most ambitious research initiatives of the European Union. With a budget of at least 1 billion and a duration of 10 years, the flagship brings together research institutions, academia, industry, enterprises, and policy makers, in a joint and collaborative initiative on an unprecedented scale. The main objective of the flagship is to consolidate and expand European scientific leadership and excellence in this research area as well as to transfer quantum physics research from the lab to the market by means of commercial applications and disruptive technologies. With over 5000 researchers from academia and industry involved in this initiative throughout its lifetime, it aims to create the next generation of disruptive technologies that will impact Europes society, placing the region as a worldwide knowledge-based industry and technological leader in this field.

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12 European Companies and Research Labs Join Forces to Boost Industrial Quantum Computing Applications - HPCwire