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How do you see AI and new technologies accelerating sustainability? and how it can accelerate sustainability as well.

We have very tangible examples of when we talk about sustainability. At least speaking for myself, we struggle in terms of understanding what sustainability is and how we can make it actionable. How can we track if some promises are kept? Can we measure what the Kenyan government is doing in terms of reforestation over time, for example?

The geospatial foundation model we have created [at IBM] is helping us quantify climate mitigating actions like reforestation, but also helping us understand how particular measures like putting up a fence can help. Its very encouraging because, not only can you see masses of trees growing, you can also quantify how many gigatons of carbon you can capture over the years.

So you make it tangible. That's probably one of my favourite aspects of what technology can do for sustainability.

As a computer scientist, there are very rare moments where you see history happening. In quantum this year, we have managed to achieve one which we call quantum utility. We have entered the quantum utility era.

Quantum utility is when you take a problem, and this case it was a small magnetisation problem, and we tasked one of our partners, the University of Berkeley to do their best classically, and we have taken the same problem. We map it to a quantum computer with our hardware today and we apply some error mitigation routines that we have created on top of our stack. These error mitigation routines are now available to everyone.

We were then in a position of showing better performance than the classic. So for the first time, we see for real, quantum utility beating classic in this particular experiment.

When we talk about quantum, we always talk about fault tolerance - having the perfect system with no computing errors. What we are doing now is trying to find, with our partners, more and more examples of this quantum utility - much broader and bigger examples of showing that the current quantum hardware is improving. Our operation routines can get us there.

First of all, how can we change our approach to build the hardware? Because we saw it classically, right? We started with bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger machines until we discovered that we needed to go modular.

What we are doing now is working on modularity for quantum processing - but modularity means that you need to establish the connectivity between the units. So we first started looking at classical links, but in the future we will also see quantum communications happening between the units, which is quite challenging. There's a bit of research behind it, from the hardware perspective, that's probably one of my personal highlights.

Another highlight probably is that I hope that we announce that we keep firmly implementing every milestone that we set ourselves in our roadmap.

You will see many companies working with [IBM] and many partners presenting quantum utility experiments already. That's going to be very refreshing - it's going to create a lot of momentum when more and more people see that. In this particular case, quantum: it's classic. So that's going to create a good vibe in the quantum community.

There is so much happening at the same time and at such speed.

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Read more:
5 minutes with: Dr. Juan Bernabe Moreno, IBM - Technology Magazine