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Imagine looking for a needle in a haystack by examining each piece of hay. What if you could analyse the entire haystack at once, cutting down the location time of the needle drastically? This is what quantum computing can do compared to conventional computing.

Quantum computing could accelerate drug development, enhance encryption security and more. But how could it benefit the manufacturing industry? Here Neil Ballinger, Head of EMEA at EU Automation, explores the future of quantum computing for manufacturing.

Traditional computing represents information using a series of bits, where each bit is assigned a one or zero. Quantum computing, on the other hand, represents information in quantum bits or qubits. Each qubit can stand for an infinite number of states between one and zero.

In comparison to conventional computers, quantum computers can process a more substantial range of values concurrently. This means that quantum computers can solve even the most computationally intensive problems much faster than classical computers. Quantum computers are capable of outrunning even the most sophisticated supercomputers and solving issues currently unsolvable.

Its important to remember that comparing a classical computer to a quantum computer is essentially like comparing a candle to a lightbulb or bicycle to a jet plane, explained Vishal Shete, Head of Quantum Value Creation at Sia Partners. Quantum computing is a completely new paradigm shift that opens up a range of possibilities.

The application of quantum computing could open up infinite possibilities in a variety of fields, including manufacturing. The use of quantum computing could help create high energy-dense batteries, materials with more strength-to-weight ratios, and more efficient synthetic and catalytic processes.

However, these are not the only benefits quantum computing could have on the manufacturing industry the technology could benefit manufacturing design, control and supply chain.

Quantum computing could change the way manufacturers design products. Currently, computer simulation plays a crucial role in product design and pretesting. However, using computer simulations, safety margins can accumulate causing product weight differences and higher cost products.

If quantum computing was to replace conventional computer simulations, calculations for individual components paths, noise, vibrations and system loads could be inputted, increasing precision and accuracy. This would likely optimise the manufacturing of individual parts whilst still considering the overall system and reducing the impact of numerous safety margins. This would allow manufacturers to lower costs without sacrificing the performance of the system.

Product design is not the only part of the manufacturing process that could benefit from quantum computing. Manufacturing control processes can be complex, often testing the limits of advanced analytics. Combing quantum computing with machine learning could mean faster optimisation runs. This combination could allow manufacturers to go beyond the current limitations of classical computing by analysing additional interactive factors and processes to increase production yields.

Using quantum computing for supply chain and logistics would also enable the transformation of the manufacturing supply landscape. The application could optimise vendor orders, lower operational costs, reduce lost sales and improve accompanying logistics using dynamic real time decision making. Quantum computing could be the perfect addition to the digital supply chain toolbox of Industry 4.0.

Despite the benefits of quantum computing, this technology could also impact current encryption systems, having the capacity to break all current encryption codes and posing a threat to the internet, e-commerce, e-banking and mobile data as we currently know it. However, there is ongoing research on developing encryptions that quantum computers cannot break.

Instead of looking at quantum computing as a threat to the digital world as we know it, its important that manufacturers focus on its potential to revolutionise processes, while keeping an eye on new developments in cybersecurity that would allow them to safely implement this technology.

There may still be a long way to go, but quantum computing is set to become a key instrument for manufacturers. This technology could provide a clear edge to those ready to adopt a quantum future.

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The potential of quantum computing for manufacturing - The Manufacturer

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.

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