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Heres a batch of fresh news and announcements from across Imperial.

From a new project to preserve safe havens for salmon, to Imperial researchers analysing the extent of the coronavirus outbreak, here is some quick-read news from across the College.

The population of Wild North Atlantic Salmon is now at its lowest level ever recorded, inspiring the new Six Rivers Project, led by the Marine and Freshwater Research Institute (MFRI) Iceland and Imperial College London, and funded by Sir Jim Ratcliffe and Ineos.

The project, which had its inaugural conference this month, is focused on preserving both the land and river ecosystems across six rivers in northeast Iceland, supporting one of the last safe havens where salmon populations still thrive.

Imperials Professor Guy Woodward said: The North Atlantic Salmon is a keystone species in the ecosystem. Icelands rivers have simple ecosystems providing ideal research conditions. Their latitude also brings with it a potential sensitivity to the effects of climate change, more so than in other parts of the world.

Read more about the inaugural conference of the Six Rivers Project.

Provost Ian Walmsley discussed the future of quantum computing at the Digital-Life-Design (DLD) conference in Munich.

He made the case for globalcollaboration in the race to develop a viable quantum computer, and spoke to German media, including BR24.

Other participants in DLD, one of the worlds most important technology events, included Nick Clegg, Ursula von der Leyen and Garry Kasparov.

The first Photonics Online Meetup a free, online-only global conference for photonics researchers went ahead with great success this month.

The five-hour-long conference on 13 January 2020 brought together 1,100 researchers in 37 countries across six continents in real time. More than 635 of these researchers gathered at 66 local hubs in 27 countries to join in together.

There was also a Twitter-based poster session, with 59 virtual posters averaging 3,000 views each. Videos of the event are now available online, with around 150 people downloading the videos in the first 24 hours.

Read more at the Photonics Online Meetup.

The Early Years Centre (EYC) has reopened after an extensive refurbishment. Staff, parents and children attended the opening event on Thursday 16 January.

Tracy Halsey, Early Years Centre Manager, thanked staff for their efforts, and Professor Emma McCoy, Early Years Committee chair, declared the new centre open with a ribbon-cutting ceremony.

This 8m investment has expand the EYCs capacity, creating an additional 56 places and refurbishing the existing indoor and outdoor space. The extra places are being introduced in response to the growing demand for affordable childcare onsite. The EYC can offer places to over 200 children and will reduce the average waiting time for a place. The EYC will celebrate its fiftieth anniversary this year.

Read more about the project on our news site.

Pembridge Hall has become one of the top halls in the UK to complete the Student Switch Off campaigns climate change quiz. Over 1,000 Imperial students took the quiz with over 500 pledging to save energy, water and recycle. Pembridge Hall will receive 50 tubs of Ben & Jerrys ice cream as their reward.

The Student Switch Off campaign, aimed at encouraging sustainability, also includes a microgrant scheme which gives students funding to organise their own pro-environmental activities. Imperial undergraduate, Lauren Wheeler, has become the first student in the UK to receive a microgrant to run an event she will raise funds to help those affected by the recent wildfires in Australia.

The hall that gets the most student engagement over the year will receive 250 for their hall committee. The campaign will continue this term.

Imperial researchers are helping with the global response to the spread of coronavirus. They are also leading voices on the matter in the media worldwide, appearing in over a thousand media articles and broadcast news packages about the outbreak.

An ongoing series of reports from the MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis and J-IDEA at Imperial is looking at the number of cases and understanding the transmissibility of the disease. Other researchers at the College are working on areas including vaccine development and helping the UK to respond.

Commentary from eleven Imperial experts has featured in global outlets including the BBC World Service, CNN, andNew York Times.

For further updates, visit the Centres website.

Want to be kept up to date on news at Imperial?

Sign up for our free quick-read daily e-newsletter, Imperial Today.

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Saving salmon and coronavirus outbreak: News from the College | Imperial News - Imperial College London

This is the first in a series of explainers on quantum technology. The other two are on quantum communication and post-quantum cryptography.

A quantum computer harnesses some of the almost-mystical phenomena of quantum mechanics to deliver huge leaps forward in processing power. Quantum machines promise to outstrip even the most capable of todaysand tomorrowssupercomputers.

They wont wipe out conventional computers, though. Using a classical machine will still be the easiest and most economical solution for tackling most problems. But quantum computers promise to power exciting advances in various fields, from materials science to pharmaceuticals research. Companies are already experimenting with them to develop things like lighter and more powerful batteries for electric cars, and to help create novel drugs.

The secret to a quantum computers power lies in its ability to generate and manipulate quantum bits, or qubits.

What is a qubit?

Today's computers use bitsa stream of electrical or optical pulses representing1s or0s. Everything from your tweets and e-mails to your iTunes songs and YouTube videos are essentially long strings of these binary digits.

Quantum computers, on the other hand, usequbits, whichare typically subatomic particles such as electrons or photons. Generating and managing qubits is a scientific and engineering challenge. Some companies, such as IBM, Google, and Rigetti Computing, use superconducting circuits cooled to temperatures colder than deep space. Others, like IonQ, trap individual atoms in electromagnetic fields on a silicon chip in ultra-high-vacuum chambers. In both cases, the goal is to isolate the qubits in a controlled quantum state.

Qubits have some quirky quantum properties that mean a connected group of them can provide way more processing power than the same number of binary bits. One of those properties is known as superposition and another is called entanglement.

Qubits can represent numerous possible combinations of 1and 0 at the same time. This ability to simultaneously be in multiple states is called superposition. To put qubits into superposition, researchers manipulate them using precision lasers or microwave beams.

Thanks to this counterintuitive phenomenon, a quantum computer with several qubits in superposition can crunch through a vast number of potential outcomes simultaneously. The final result of a calculation emerges only once the qubits are measured, which immediately causes their quantum state to collapse to either 1or 0.

Researchers can generate pairs of qubits that are entangled, which means the two members of a pair exist in a single quantum state. Changing the state of one of the qubits will instantaneously change the state of the other one in a predictable way. This happens even if they are separated by very long distances.

Nobody really knows quite how or why entanglement works. It even baffled Einstein, who famously described it as spooky action at a distance. But its key to the power of quantum computers. In a conventional computer, doubling the number of bits doubles its processing power. But thanks to entanglement, adding extra qubits to a quantum machine produces an exponential increase in its number-crunching ability.

Quantum computers harness entangled qubits in a kind of quantum daisy chain to work their magic. The machines ability to speed up calculations using specially designed quantum algorithms is why theres so much buzz about their potential.

Thats the good news. The bad news is that quantum machines are way more error-prone than classical computers because of decoherence.

The interaction of qubits with their environment in ways that cause their quantum behavior to decay and ultimately disappear is called decoherence. Their quantum state is extremely fragile. The slightest vibration or change in temperaturedisturbances known as noise in quantum-speakcan cause them to tumble out of superposition before their job has been properly done. Thats why researchers do their best to protect qubits from the outside world in those supercooled fridges and vacuum chambers.

But despite their efforts, noise still causes lots of errors to creep into calculations. Smart quantum algorithmscan compensate for some of these, and adding more qubits also helps. However, it will likely take thousands of standard qubits to create a single, highly reliable one, known as a logical qubit. This will sap a lot of a quantum computers computational capacity.

And theres the rub: so far, researchers havent been able to generate more than 128 standard qubits (see our qubit counter here). So were still many years away from getting quantum computers that will be broadly useful.

That hasnt dented pioneers hopes of being the first to demonstrate quantum supremacy.

What is quantum supremacy?

Its the point at which a quantum computer can complete a mathematical calculation that is demonstrably beyond the reach of even the most powerful supercomputer.

Its still unclear exactly how many qubits will be needed to achieve this because researchers keep finding new algorithms to boost the performance of classical machines, and supercomputing hardware keeps getting better. But researchers and companies are working hard to claim the title, running testsagainst some of the worlds most powerful supercomputers.

Theres plenty of debate in the research world about just how significant achieving this milestone will be. Rather than wait for supremacy to be declared, companies are already starting to experiment with quantum computers made by companies like IBM, Rigetti, and D-Wave, a Canadian firm. Chinese firms like Alibaba are also offering access to quantum machines. Some businesses are buying quantum computers, while others are using ones made available through cloud computing services.

Where is a quantum computer likely to be most useful first?

One of the most promising applications of quantum computers is for simulating the behavior of matterdown to the molecular level. Auto manufacturers like Volkswagen and Daimler are using quantum computers to simulate the chemical composition of electrical-vehicle batteries to help find new ways to improve their performance. And pharmaceutical companies are leveraging them to analyze and compare compounds that could lead to the creation of new drugs.

The machines are also great for optimization problems because they can crunch through vast numbers of potential solutions extremely fast. Airbus, for instance, is using them to help calculate the most fuel-efficient ascent and descent paths for aircraft. And Volkswagen has unveiled a service that calculates the optimal routes for buses and taxis in cities in order to minimize congestion. Some researchers also think the machines could be used to accelerate artificial intelligence.

It could take quite a few years for quantum computers to achieve their full potential. Universities and businesses working on them are facing a shortage of skilled researchersin the fieldand a lack of suppliersof some key components. But if these exotic new computing machines live up to their promise, they could transform entire industries and turbocharge global innovation.

See the article here:
Explainer: What is a quantum computer? - MIT Technology Review

The massive amount of processing power generated by computer manufacturers has not yet been able to quench our thirst for speed and computing capacity. In 1947, American computer engineer Howard Aiken said that just six electronic digital computers would satisfy the computing needs of the United States. Others have made similar errant predictions about the amount of computing power that would support our growing technological needs. Of course, Aiken didn't count on the large amounts of data generated by scientific research, the proliferation of personal computers or the emergence of the Internet, which have only fueled our need for more, more and more computing power.

Will we ever have the amount of computing power we need or want? If, as Moore's Law states, the number of transistors on a microprocessor continues to double every 18 months, the year 2020 or 2030 will find the circuits on a microprocessor measured on an atomic scale. And the logical next step will be to create quantum computers, which will harness the power of atoms and molecules to perform memory and processing tasks. Quantum computers have the potential to perform certain calculations significantly faster than any silicon-based computer.

Scientists have already built basic quantum computers that can perform certain calculations; but a practical quantum computer is still years away. In this article, you'll learn what a quantum computer is and just what it'll be used for in the next era of computing.

You don't have to go back too far to find the origins of quantum computing. While computers have been around for the majority of the 20th century, quantum computing was first theorized less than 30 years ago, by a physicist at the Argonne National Laboratory. Paul Benioff is credited with first applying quantum theory to computers in 1981. Benioff theorized about creating a quantum Turing machine. Most digital computers, like the one you are using to read this article, are based on the Turing Theory. Learn what this is in the next section.

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How Quantum Computers Work | HowStuffWorks

by Tom Koulopoulos

The next era of computing will stretch our minds into a spooky new world that were just starting to understand.

In 1946 the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, or the ENIAC, was introduced. The worlds first commercial computer was intended to be used by the military to project the trajectory of missiles, doing in a few seconds what it would otherwise take a human mathematician about three days. Its 20,000 vacuum tubes (the glowing glass light bulb-like predecessors to the transistor) connected by 500,000 hand soldered wires were a marvel of human ingenuity and technology.

Imagine if it were possible to go back to the developers and users of that early marvel and make the case that in 70 years there would be ten billion computers worldwide and half of the worlds population would be walking around with computers 100,000,000 times as powerful as the ENIAC in their pants pockets.

Youd have been considered a lunatic!

I want you to keep that in mind as you resist the temptation to do the same to me because of what Im about to share.

Quantum Supremacy

Digital computers will soon reach the limits of demanding technologies such as AI. Consider just the impact of these two projection: by 2025 driverless cars alone may produce as much data as exists in the entire world today; fully digitizing every cell in the human body would exceed ten times all of the data stored globally today. In these and many more cases we need to find ways to deal with unprecedented amounts of data and complexity. Enter quantum computing.

Youve likely heard of quantum computing. Amazingly, its a concept as old as digital computers. However, you may have discounted it as a far off future thats about as relevant to your life as flying cars. Well, it may be time to reconsider. Quantum computing is progressing at a rate that is surprising even those who are building it.

Understanding what quantum computers are and how they work challenges much of what we know of not just computing, but the basics of how the physical world appears to operate. Quantum mechanics, the basis for quantum computing, describes the odd and non-intuitive way the universe operates at a sub-atomic level. Its part science, part theory, and part philosophy.

Classical digital computers use what are called bits, something most all of us are familiar with. A bit can be a one or a zero. Quantum computers use what are called qubits (quantum bits). A quibit can also be a one or a zero but it can also be an infinite number of possibilities in between the two. The thing about qubits is that while a digital bit is always either on (1) or off (0), a qubit is always in whats called a superposition state, neither on nor off.

Although its a rough analogy, think of a qubit as a spinning coin thats just been flipped in the dark. While its spinning is it heads or tails? Its at the same time both and neither until it stops spinning and we then shine a light on it. However, a binary bit is like a coin that has a switch to make it glow in the dark. If I asked you Is it glowing? there would only be two answers, yes or no, and those would not change as it spins.

Thats what a qubit is like when compared to a classical digital bit. A quibit does not have a state until you effectively shine a light on it, while a binary bit maintains its state until that state is manually or mechanically changed.

Dont get too hung up on that analogy because as you get deeper into the quantum world trying to use what we know of the physical world is always a very rough and ultimately flawed way to describe the way things operate at the quantum level of matter.

However, the difficulty in understanding how quantum computers works hasnt stopped their progress. Google engineers recently talked about how the quantum computers they are building are progressing so fast that that they may achieve the elusive goal of whats called quantum supremacy (the point at which quantum computers can exceed the ability of classical binary computer) within months. While that may be a bit of stretch, even conservative projections put us on a 5-year timeline for quantum supremacy.

Quantum vs Classical Computing

Quantum computers, which are built using these qubits, will not replace all classical digital computers, but they will become an indispensable part of how we use computers to model the world and to integrate artificial intelligence into our lives.

Quantum computing will be one of the most radical shifts in the history of science, likely outpacing any advances weve seen to date with prior technological revolutions, such as the advent of semiconductors. They will enable us to take on problems that would take even the most powerful classical supercomputers millions or even billions of years to solve. Thats not just because quantum computers are faster but because they can approach problem solving with massive parallelism using the qualities of how quantum particles behave.

The irony is that the same thing that makes quantum computers so difficult to understand, their harnessing of natures smallest particles, also gives them the ability to precisely simulate the biological world at its most detailed. This means that we can model everything from chemical reactions, to biology, to pharmaceuticals, to the inner workings of the universe, to the spread of pandemics, in ways that were simply impossible with classical computers.

A Higher Power

The reason for the all of the hype behind the rate at which quantum computers are evolving has to do with whats called doubly exponential growth.

The exponential growth that most of us are familiar with, and which is being talked about lately, refers to the classical doubling phenomenon. For example, Moores law, which projects the doubling in the density of transistors on a silicon chip every 18 months. Its hard to wrap our linear brains around exponential growth, but its nearly impossible to wrap them around doubly exponential growth.

Doubly exponential growth simply has no analog in the physical world. Doubly exponential growth means that you are raising a number to a power and then raising that to another power. It looks like this 510^10.

What this means is that while a binary computer can store 256 states with 8 bits (28), a quantum computer with eight qubits (recall that a qubit is the conceptual equivalent of a digital bit in a classical computer) can store 1077 bits of data! Thats a number with 77 zeros, or, to put it into perspective, scientists estimate that there are 1078 atoms in the entire visible universe.

Even Einstein had difficulty with entanglement calling it, spooky action at a distance.

By the way, just to further illustrate the point, if you add one more qubit the number of bits (or more precisely, states) that can be stored just jumped to 10154 (one more bit in a classical computer would only raise the capacity to 1078).

Heres whats really mind blowing about quantum computing (as if what we just described isnt already mind-blowing enough.) A single caffeine molecule is made up of 24 atoms and it can have 1048 quantum states (there are only 1050 atoms that make up the Earth). Modeling caffeine precisely is simply not possible with classical computers. Using the worlds fastest super computer it would take 100,000,000,000,000 times the age of the universe to process the 1048 calculations that represent all of the possible states of a caffeine molecule!

So, the obvious question is, How could any computer, quantum or otherwise, take on something of that magnitude? Well, how does nature do it? That cup of coffee youre drinking has trillions of caffeine molecules and nature is doing just fine handling all of the quantum states they are in. Since nature is a quantum machine what better way to model it than a quantum computer?

Spooky Action

The other aspect of quantum computing that challenges our understanding of how the quantum world works is whats called entanglement. Entanglement describes a phenomenon in which two quantum particles are connected in such a way that no matter how great the distance between them they will both have the same state when they are measured.

At first blush that doesnt seem to be all that novel. After all, if I were to paint two balls red and then separate them by the distance of the universe, both would still be red. However, the state of a quantum object is always in whats called a superposition, meaning that it has no inherent state. Think of our coin flip example from earlier where the coin is in a superposition state until it stops spinning.

If instead of a color its two states were up or down it would always be in both states while also in neither state, that is until an observation or measurement forces it to pick a state. Again, think back to the spinning coin.

Now imagine two coins entangled and flipped simultaneously at different ends of the universe. Once you stop the spin of one coin and reveal that its heads the other coin would instantly stop spinning and also be heads.

If this makes your head hurt, youre in good company. Even Einstein had difficulty with entanglement calling it, spooky action at a distance. His concern was that the two objects couldnt communicate at a speed faster than the speed of light. Whats especially spooky about this phenomenon is that the two objects arent communicating at all in any classical sense of the term communication.

Entanglement creates the potential for all sorts of advances in computing, from how we create 100 percent secure communications against cyberthreats, to the ultimate possibility of teleportation.

Room For Possibility

So, should you run out a buy a quantum computer? Well, its not that easy. Qubits need to be super cooled and are exceptionally finicky particles that require an enormous room-sized apparatus and overhead. Not unlike the ENIAC once did.

You can however use a quantum computer for free or lease its use for more sophisticated applications For example, IBMs Q, is available both as an open source learning environment for anyone as well as a powerful tool for fintech users. However, Ill warn you that even if youre accustomed to programming computers, it will still feel as though youre teaching yourself to think in an entirely foreign language.

The truth is that we might as well be surrounded by 20,000 glowing vacuum tubes and 500,000 hand soldered wires. We can barely imagine what the impact of quantum computing will be in ten to twenty years. No more so than the early users of the ENIAC could have predicted the mind-boggling ways in which we use digital computers today.

Listen in to my two podcasts with scientists from IBM, MIT, and Harvard to find out more about quantum computing. Quantum Computing Part I, Quantum Computing Part II

This article was originally published on Inc.

Image credit: Pixabay

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Tom Koulopoulos is the author of 10 books and founder of the Delphi Group, a 25-year-old Boston-based think tank and a past Inc. 500 company that focuses on innovation and the future of business. He tweets from @tkspeaks.

Read more:
The End Of The Digital Revolution Is Coming: Here's What's Next - Innovation Excellence

Delta Air Lines is embarking on a multi-year collaborative effort with IBM including joining theIBM Q Networkto explore the potential capabilities of quantum computing to transform experiences for customers and employees.

"Partnering with innovative companies like IBM is one way Delta stays on the leading edge of tech to better serve our customers and our people, while drawing the blueprints for application across our industry," saidRahul Samant, Delta's CIO. "We've done this most recently with biometrics in our international terminals and we're excited to explore how quantum computing can be applied to address challenges across the day of travel."

TheIBM Q Network is a global community of Fortune 500 companies, startups, academic institutions and research labs working to advance quantum computing and explore practical applications.

Additionally, through theIBM Q Hub at NC State University, Delta will have access to the IBM Q Network's fleet of universal hardware quantum computersfor commercial use cases and fundamental research, including the recently-announced 53-qubit quantum computer, which, the company says, has the most qubits of a universal quantum computer available for external access in the industry, to date.

"We are very excited by the addition of Delta to our list of collaborators working with us on building practical quantum computing applications," said director of IBM ResearchDario Gil. "IBM's focus, since we put the very first quantum computer on the cloud in 2016, has been to move quantum computing beyond isolated lab experiments conducted by a handful of organizations, into the hands of tens of thousands of users. We believe a clear advantage will be awarded to early adopters in the era of quantum computing and with partners like Delta, we're already making significant progress on that mission."

For more information about the IBM Q Network, go to http://www.ibm.com/quantum-computing/network/overview

Read the rest here:
Delta Partners with IBM to Explore Quantum Computing - Database Trends and Applications