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ARLINGTON, Va. U.S. military researchers are asking two research organizations to find new ways of measuring the long-term utility of next-generation quantum computing technology for military applications.

Officials of the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in Arlington, Va., announced contracts in February to Raytheon BBN in Cambridge, Mass., and to the University of Southern California (USC) in Los Angeles for the Quantum Benchmarking program.

DARPA is asking Raytheon BBN and USC to determine if industry could design application-specific and hardware-agnostic benchmarks to test the utility of and best applications for quantum computers, as well as estimate the hardware resources necessary for quantum computing operations.

Raytheon BBN won a $2.9 million contract on 24 Feb. 2022, and USC won a $4.1 million contract on 23 Feb. 2022 for the DARPA Quantum Benchmarking program.

Related: Researchers approach industry for test metrics to measure the utility and efficiency of quantum computing

Future generations of quantum computing are expected to solve computing problems of unprecedented size and complexity, or those that today's most powerful computers are unable to solve. Quantum computing represents a new computing paradigm that capitalizes on the quantum mechanical phenomena of superposition and entanglement to create states that scale exponentially with number of quantum bits.

Experts believe that quantum computers within the next few decades will revolutionize scientific and technical fields like machine learning, quantum chemistry, materials discovery, molecular simulation, many-body physics, classification, nonlinear dynamics, supply chain optimization, drug discovery, battery catalysis, genomic analysis, fluid dynamics, and protein structure prediction.

For some of these examples, quantum computers are expected to be useful simulators. In others, quantum computers will be expected to handle combinatorial complexity that is intractable for conventional computers.

What today's computer scientists don't know, however, is what size, quality, and configuration of quantum computer would enable kinds of advances that military systems integrators will need in the future.

Related: Wanted: quantum computing with size, weight, and power consumption (SWaP) small enough for military missions

Still to be answered are questions like what applications could benefit most from quantum computing, and at what kind of scaling; how can systems integrators understand the new core computational capability of quantum computing; and what kind of metrics and testing procedures do scientists need for quantifying progress towards quantum computing capabilities.

That's where the DARPA Quantum Benchmarking project comes in. The project seeks to distil benchmarks for quantum utility to be useful for specific applications at specific scales -- especially using the kinds of metrics that suitable for driving research and development.

The Quantum Benchmarking contractors will create new benchmarks that quantitatively measure progress towards specific computational challenges. In parallel, the program seeks estimate the computer hardware necessary to measure benchmark performance. The project's benchmarks will be hardware-agnostic for problems where quantum approaches most likely will be needed.

The Quantum Benchmarking contractors will quantify the long-term utility of quantum computers by solving some hard problems from a list of application in a variety of military domains, and grouping these application by common enabling capabilities.

Related: The future of artificial intelligence and quantum computing

Raytheon BBN and USC also will develop test procedures for quantifying progress in research; create scalable multi-dimensional benchmarks; and develop tools for estimating necessary quantum hardware resources for hard-to-achieve military capabilities.

The two organizations will analyze applications that require large-scale, universal, fault-tolerant quantum computers; estimates of the classical and quantum resources necessary to execute quantum algorithms on large-scale; applications of fault tolerance and error correction; and nontraditional quantum computing paradigms.

Raytheon BBN and USC researchers will focus on two technical areas: hardware-agnostic approaches, and hardware-specific approaches.

For more information contact Raytheon BBN online at http://www.raytheonintelligenceandspace.com/what-we-do/bbn, USC at https://research.usc.edu, or DARPA at http://www.darpa.mil/program/quantum-benchmarking.

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DARPA asks Raytheon BBN and USC researchers to test limits of quantum computing for military applications - Military & Aerospace Electronics

VALENCIA, Spain & BURNABY, BC, Canada, March 3, 2022 CaixaBank, the leading financial group in Spain, and D-Wave Systems Inc., a global leader in quantum computing systems, software, and services, and the only provider building both annealing and gate-model quantum computers, today announced the business results for two significant financial quantum hybrid computing applications for investment portfolio optimization and investment hedging calculation. The quantum hybrid applications have significantly decreased compute time to solve complex financial problems, improving investment portfolio optimization, increasing a bond portfolio internal rate of return (IRR), and minimizing the capital needed for hedging operations, as a result of their collaboration.

Quantum in Investment Portfolio Hedging and Bond Portfolio Optimization

CaixaBanks Life insurance and Pensions company, VidaCaixa, leveraged D-Waves Leapquantum cloud service and quantum hybrid solvers which combine the strengths of classical and quantum computing to build a quantum computing application within their investment portfolio selection and allocation, and within their portfolio hedging efforts. With this project, CaixaBank Group becomes the first known financial services company in the world to apply quantum computing in investment hedging in the insurance sector. The group is evaluating putting the application into regular production not only in VidaCaixa but in other areas in the organization, over the coming months.

The CaixaBank Group team utilized D-Waves quantum hybrid solver services to code a faster algorithm, which markedly reduces the computing time necessary to reach an optimal solution to improve the investment portfolio hedging. What normally took the bank several hours of compute time was reduced to just minutes via quantum computing technology an up to 90% decrease in compute time over the traditional solution. This reduction of compute time facilitates increased modeling complexity, allowing for a more dynamic model that is better adapted to real-time markets; optimizes the invested capital while maintaining constant risk levels; and improves the hedging decision-making process.

When it comes to investment portfolio selection and allocation, the algorithm rapidly generates portfolios that can be optimized against a higher variety of constraints in a reduced timeframe. The result was a successful application which optimizes IRR by 10% in a chosen portfolio of bonds.

We have always been an innovation-first organization, and very early on we recognized that investing in quantum computing could help us more efficiently provide state-of-the art products and services in order to offer the best client experience. This has been the case with this proof of concept, which confirms the bank as the first one in Spain, and one of the first in the world, to incorporate quantum computing into its daily activity, says Gonzalo Gortazar, CEO of CaixaBank. During his participation in a commissioning ceremony in Jlich, Germany, in which D-Wave announced the first Leap quantum cloud-based system outside North America at Forschungszentrum Jlich Supercomputing Centre, Gortazar confirmed CaixaBanks commitment to continue to explore the potential of quantum computing in the financial services industry: We are very appreciative of seeing this industry growing and maturing, and we look forward to upping our investment and our efforts in quantum, which is surely going to be transformational for our industry. We are very keen to work with D-Wave in this process.

Our focus has always been on the development and delivery of quantum computing for practical applications and business value, said Alan Baratz, CEO of D-Wave. The finance industry is undergoing massive transformation at this moment in time, which is why the industry is poised for great business benefit from quantum computing investment. CaixaBank has a clear vision for implementing market-ready quantum applications to drive efficiency, client value, and scale. We look forward to continued collaboration with them as they expand their offerings and identify additional quantum computing use-cases.

CaixaBanks Quantum Journey

In 2019, CaixaBank set up a team of experts with IT technicians, mathematicians, and risk analysts dedicated to innovation in the quantum field in a multidisciplinary way, in order to explore the potential for quantum technology to enhance the banks different capacities in diverse fields, such as risk assessment and tail risk simulators, fraud detection with artificial intelligence and machine learning, quantum safe cryptography, portfolio selection and allocation, and data mining optimization.

One of the first projects was the implementation of a quantum algorithm capable of assessing the financial risk of two portfolios created specifically for the project based on real data, one consisting of mortgages and the other, treasury bills.

In 2020, CaixaBank developed the first machine learning algorithm to classify risks in Spanish banking leveraging quantum computing. In that case, CaixaBank combined quantum computing and conventional computing in different phases of the calculation process to classify credit risk profiles. To do this, CaixaBank used a public data set corresponding to 1,000 artificial users, with a similar profile to existing customers, but with information configured specifically for the test.

In this project, CaixaBank used the Leap quantum cloud service to access D-Waves quantum hybrid solver service that incorporates the Advantage quantum computer. The cloud-access and real-time service empowers businesses like the bank and countless others across industries to solve large and complex business-scale problems. To date, D-Wave customers have built hundreds of early applications using their systems, including protein folding, financial modeling, scheduling, logistics, manufacturing optimization, machine learning, route optimization, and more. With these results, CaixaBank is working towards putting hybrid quantum applications into production.

About CaixaBank

CaixaBank is the leading financial group in Spain. After its merger with Bankia, the bank has assets of 685.74 billion, making it Spains largest bank, and one of the leading banks in Europe. CaixaBank also has a strong presence in Portugal, where it controls 100% of BPI.

The Group, chaired by Jos Ignacio Goirigolzarri and led by Gonzalo Gortzar, has around 21 million customers and the largest commercial network in Spain and Portugal, and it is a leader in digital banking with 73.1% of clients being digital.

About D-Wave Systems Inc.

D-Wave is a leader in the development and delivery of quantum computing systems, software and services and is the worlds first commercial supplier of quantum computers and the only company developing both annealing quantum computers and gate-model quantum computers. Our mission is to unlock the power of quantum computing for business and society, today. We do this by delivering customer value with practical quantum applications for problems as diverse as logistics, artificial intelligence, materials sciences, drug discovery, scheduling, cybersecurity, fault detection, and financial modeling. D-Waves systems are being used by some of the worlds most advanced organizations, including NEC Corporation, Volkswagen, DENSO, Lockheed Martin, University of Southern California, Forschungszentrum Jlich and Los Alamos National Laboratory. With headquarters near Vancouver, Canada, D-Waves US operations are based in Palo Alto, CA. With headquarters and the Quantum Engineering Center of Excellence based near Vancouver, Canada, D-Waves U.S. operations are based in Palo Alto, Calif. D-Wave has a blue-chip investor base that includes PSP Investments, Goldman Sachs, BDC Capital, NEC Corp., Aegis Group Partners, and In-Q-Tel.

D-Wave announced in February it has entered into a definitive merger agreement with DPCM Capital, Inc. (DPCM Capital) (NYSE:XPOA), a publicly traded special purpose acquisition company. Upon closing of the transaction, shares of D-Wave Quantum Inc., a newly formed parent company of D-Wave and DPCM Capital, are expected to trade on the NYSE under the symbol QBTS. Learn more atwww.dwavesys.com/investors.

Source: D-Wave

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D-Wave and CaixaBank Collaborate on Quantum Applications for Finance Industry - HPCwire

Explore the race to save encryption from Quantum hacking and how to protect from invasion

Quantum computers could become far more powerful than digital computers. Quantum computers have limitless potential. But it is still in its infancy, incredibly expensive, and fraught with problems.it will help hackers get access to private data by breaking encryption. quantum computing is useful but, quantum hacking is dangerous. Quantum Hacking is the use of quantum computers for malicious purposes. even the most secure data encryption algorithms also will be hacked and its all the fault of quantum computers.

Quantum hacking is performed by modern cryptographic strategies which often use private and public keys to encrypt and decrypt data through a mathematical equation. Not all cryptography will be vulnerable to quantum computing, but many current forms will. Currently, quantum computers are weak, it will only be a few decades or so until more powerful quantum machines are widely available. One study suggests that encryption using a 2048-bit key could be cracked in 8 hours using a quantum computer. An expert says that the threat of a nation-state adversary getting a large quantum computer and being able to access your information is real.

Quantum Hacking can break cryptographic protocols which have a private key, they need just a number to decrypt encrypted data. ability to break encryption is the worst fear about quantum computers. Currently, no action is developed but developed quantum-safe encryption its a technical solution to this problem. strong password authentication never stood a chance against a hacker with access to a quantum computer. Even the super-secure blockchain technology wont be enough to protect against a quantum computer.

A Company in San Diego, California has a lot of computer geniuses, and experienced people who worked in the U.S. Governments cyber warfare, all are spending their time trying to stay one step ahead of the criminals by anticipating their move. Even though its moves are years away. If a hacker were to try to intercept these computer bits, the sensor beam would detect it.

In 2015, the US National Security Agency announced that crypto systems are vulnerable, and it advised US businesses and the government to replace them. The next year, NIST invited computer scientists globally to submit candidate post-quantum algorithms to a process in which the agency would test their quality, with the help of the entire crypto community. and then publish official versions of those algorithms. Similar organizations in other countries, from France to China, will make their announcements.

Microsoft, Google, and IBM companies are investing heavily in quantum computing academic research. International governments are providing some anti-hacking solutions, using quantum technology to help some government agencies and supersized corporations protect their passwords. Its hard to crack and unbreakable.

Multiple actors are working on the problems of quantum security. China has made a disproportionate investment in quantum security. This could lead to a possibility in which Chinese-sponsored companies are the only ones with access to tools that prevent quantum hacking.

Technology comes to a future problem; todays security systems wouldnt be able to provide much protection at all. And hackers are always eager to mess up great new technology. Hackers may soon be able to expose all digital communications by using advanced quantum computers. A new form of cryptography would stop hackers.

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Is the World Ready to Fight Quantum Hacking to Save the Internet? - Analytics Insight

Youve read the headlines. A ransomware attack forces a major American gasoline pipeline to shut down. Hackers hit Dallas ISD data. The U.S. braces for Russian cyberattacks as the Ukraine conflict escalates.

Youve gotten the emails. Your personal information was compromised in a data breach. You should change your password immediately.

Cyberattacks are a growing threat around the world. About three-quarters of nearly 600 C-suite executives recently surveyed by auditing giant Deloitte said their organizations had experienced between one and 10 cyberincidents or breaches in the last year.

Companies, governments and other organizations are trying to bulk up their defenses to protect their information infrastructure. According to government estimates, the employment of information security analysts is expected to grow 33% this decade faster than the average for all occupations.

Yet there is a shortage of skilled workers to fill these jobs. Microsoft estimates that for every two cybersecurity jobs that are filled in the U.S. there is one open position.

Our colleges and universities in North Texas are doing something to address that problem. Collin College just earned a prestigious designation from the National Security Agency as a Center of Academic Excellence in Cyber Defense. It becomes the fifth institution of higher education in Dallas-Fort Worth to receive an NSA academic designation, following Southern Methodist University, the University of Dallas, the University of Texas at Dallas and the University of North Texas.

Collin College is also the first community college in the region to earn this accolade.

The label comes with a lot of perks for Collin College faculty and students. There are more than 40 instructors in the cybersecurity program, about 1,700 students enrolled full time for an associates degree in cybersecurity and more than 200 in the new bachelors degree in cybersecurity. About 500 other students have indicated an interest in cybersecurity but have not yet committed to a degree.

As an NSA Center of Academic Excellence, Collin College can tap into grants and scholarship money to grow the programs resources and enrollment. Ervin Frenzel, director of the colleges cybersecurity program, said that institutions with the NSA recognition can also share instructors.

For example, if there is a cohort at the college interested in the internet of things a network of everyday objects connected to the internet that collect and share data with one another then specialists from across the U.S. can assist in developing or teaching that curriculum. Or Collin College can lend its experts on wireless intrusion detection to another institution.

Cybersecurity specialists are not just concerned with machines. They study people and processes to identify and fix vulnerabilities that prevent bad actors from stealing your credit card or from paralyzing a hospitals computer systems. We urgently need to grow that professional pipeline, and were glad to see North Texas rise to the challenge.

Excerpt from:
How the NSA is creating a cybersecurity education pipeline in Texas - The Dallas Morning News

In recent days, The Debrieflooked at the evolving views on the subject of unidentified aerial phenomenon expressed by the Air Forcebeginning in the late 1940s. The Air Forces silence in dealing with this topic was also the subject of a recent analysis by Christopher Mellon, which seems to continue into the present.

While the views of many United States federal and military agencies when dealing with UFOs have evolved considerably over time, what of the National Security Agency (NSA), arguably one of the most secretive groups inside of Americas military and security apparatus?

Prying historical documents out of the NSA and challenging its decisions to classify information on any subject, including UFOs, is a daunting task on the best of days. This is a fact that researchers attempting to gather this type of data, such as John Greenewald jr of the Black Vault run into regularly. When Greenewald attempted to have a heavily redacted set of UFO-related NSA documents reviewed as part of a Mandatory Declassification Review (MDR), he was eventuallyinformed thatthe original, unredacted documents could not be found. The NSA is apparently so skilled at protecting the nations deepest, most critical secrets that they can even hide them from themselves.

But a few NSA documents dealing with the subject of UFOs have survived. One of these is a 1968 report on the phenomenon of unidentified flying objects, what the most common theories regarding their origins were, and what implications they might hold for matters as weighty as the survivability of human civilization. The document, produced by an author whose name remains redacted, was titled UFO Hypothesis and Survival Questions. The NSA was looking at the question seriously and considering the long-term implications of the possible existence of UFOs and how the nation might be best prepared for what such encounters could entail.

The document is a draft version of what was presumably the final release, but that makes it potentially even more interesting because it includes numerous footnotes and scribbled comments from the author. The paper broke down five different general hypotheses as to the overall explanation for the phenomenon of unidentified flying objects. Of potential interest is the first footnote in the document, attached to the first use of the acronym UFO. The footnote reads, All flying, sailing or maneuvering aerial objects whether glowing, pulsating or of a constant metallic hue, whose shape is somewhat circular or cigarish. Note the use of the adjective cigarish. It sounds rather reminiscent of the now-infamous tic-tac.

The general categories they identified were as follows:

To put this document in a historical context in terms of the debate over UAP, its worth pausing here and looking at the widely publicized UAP Task Force report from June 25, 2001. As you may recall, that document also broke down the governments assessment of various bins of potential explanations for sightings. Perhaps not coincidentally, the number of such bins in that report was also five. They were:

The 2021 report does not attempt to attribute any of the reported sightings to hoaxes or hallucinations, but this is easily explained by the preamble to that list which specifies that the reports under consideration were given by trained military observers. The majority were described as also involving observations with multiple sensors. That factor would almost eliminate the possibility of hoaxes and they certainly wouldnt wish to imply that their Top-Gun pilots were insane.

The other categories fit in remarkably well with items 3 through 5 in the 1968 report. Natural Phenomena would clearly encompass some airborne clutter and natural atmospheric phenomena. Secret Earth Projects is a perfect fit for USG/Industry developmental programs and foreign adversarial systems. And the other bin obviously opens the door to objects related to extraterrestrial intelligence, among other things. As in other studies of government UAP documents, The Debrief has examined here, its fascinating how little the conversation seems to have changed in more than seven decades.

The NSA report spends relatively little time on the idea of hoaxes accounting for all or most UFO sightings and takes a skeptical view on the theory. It speaks of the rarity of men of science perpetrating such fakery while acting in their professional capacities, including military professionals. The increasing frequency of such reports during the period being considered is also noted. It concludes by saying that if this number of reports were indeed all fictional, then a human mental aberration of alarming proportions would appear to be developing, and such an aberration would seem to have serious implications for nations equipped with nuclear toys.

The report treats the idea of hallucinations in a similar fashion. While agreeing that some people do experience hallucinations, occasionally even among groups of people sharing a vision, the author notes the number of reports that include data not limited to human sensory perceptions. They note that many observations are backed up by radar data and gun camera video footage. There is also a reference to reports where physical evidence of a circumstantial nature seemed to support the reports of sightings. The physical evidence reference is linked to works published by Jacques Vallee. Were all such sightings to be hallucinations, the report concludes that we might bring into strong question the ability of mankind to distinguish reality from fantasy, thereby producing a negative impact on mans ability to survive in an increasinglycomplex world.

The report finds the possibility that all UFOs might be natural phenomena to be troubling on multiple fronts, particularly when it comes to Americas ability to maintain early warning systems against potential Soviet nuclear missile attacks. This isnt a concern over the possibility that humans might misinterpret some form of weather pattern or other naturally occurring biological or meteorological activity, which is always a possibility. The larger danger here is that the people manning Americas defensive perimeter might develop a blind spot to legitimate UFO incursions, writing them off as such natural phenomena. Even worse, the Soviets might take advantage of this blind spot and build offensive systems that would mimic the UAP, luring us into complacency.

The reports final concern seems far more grave and suggests records of truly remarkable UFO behavior. It references objects that appear to defy radar detection and cause massive electromagnetic interference. The author goes on to stress the need to discover the nature of these objects or plasmas before any prospective enemy can use their properties to build a device or system to circumvent or jam our air and spect detection systems. This too is eerily reminiscent of the recommendations included in the June 25, 2021 AATIP report. Sadly, the only footnote included in this portion of the report sends the reader to an article in the Encyclopedia Brittanica describing Project Grudge.

The report only spares a single paragraph to the possibility of Secret Earth Projects. The author confidently states that there is little doubt as to the validity of this hypothesis. They warn that all UFOs should be carefully scrutinized to ferret out such enemy or friendly projects. The failure to do so could leave the nation vulnerable to a new, secret doomsday weapon.

That brings us to the most intriguing portion of the report, dealing with the possibility of an extraterrestrial intelligence being the source of these UFO sightings. Interestingly, the chapter is preceded by a handwritten note stating that the hypothesis cannot be disregarded. The note goes on to reference the 1952 wave of UFOs seen over Washington, D.C. A handwritten footnote to this addition points the reader to the work of Professor James E. McDonald, J. Allen Hynek, and (again) Jacques Vallee. McDonalds name is misspelled in the handwritten note as MacDonald, but there is little doubt as to who the author meant to reference. McDonald was a legendary UFO researcher in his own right, who died under what some researchers consider questionable circumstances. You can see the FBI file that was maintained on McDonald here.

As to the question of mankinds potential interaction with an extraterrestrial intelligence, the report divides the possibilities into categories based on whether we discover them or they discover us. A number of survival strategies are offered. The author references human interactions between technologically advanced civilizations and indigenous peoples who were overwhelmed by them, placing humanity in the role of the disadvantaged species if the creators of the UFOs have a significant scientific advantage over the humans they discovered here on Earth. The report suggests strategies such as full and honest acceptance of the nature of the inferiorities separating you from the advantages of the other people. It advises a strategy of national solidarity in dealing with the invading culture and limited interaction with the aliens to the extent that is possible. Humans are also advised to learn from the technology of the aliens as rapidly as possible and prepare for unconventional, asymmetrical warfare. These strategies could easily have been the inspiration for a variety of science fiction movies ranging from War ofthe Worlds to Independence Day.

Nothing in the NSA report suggests that the presence of nonhuman intelligences in our airspace had been definitively proven. But at the same time, the agency was not in any way scoffing at it. They were leaning toward preparing for the possibility and developing strategies that might best equip the nation in the event of a potentially hostile alien invasion. The report closes with the suggestion that more of this survival attitude is called for in dealing with the UFO problem.

It may be worth considering how often the phrase the UFO problem has shown up in military and government documents from the post-World War 2 era reviewed by The Debrief. Such references have been found in records from the Army, the Air Force, and security agencies. If the question was seen as purely speculative or the product of delusional conspiracy theorists, a reference to the UFO question or the UFO theory might have been more likely. But the word problem suggests that the guardians of our nations secrets and security were exploring a phenomenon that they saw as not only possible but perhaps likely, if not confirmed. And plans were under discussion to come up with a solution to that problem.

Perhaps if additional official documents come to light in the future, more answers will be revealed. But at this point, what we have learned of the United States governments early responses to reports of unexplained objects in our skies sounds more like a serious effort to understand and perhaps even confront a very real unknown phenomenon than any sort of preparation to respond to outbreaks of mass hysteria.

Follow Jazz Shaw and connect with him on Twitter @JazzShaw.

Excerpt from:
The Secretive History of the NSA's UFO Studies in the Sixties - The Debrief