Learning Quantum Computing with thousands of fellow Qiskitters
This summer I had to opportunity to attend the first-ever Qiskit Global Summer School hosted by IBM Quantum. Taking place between 21–30 July 2020, thousands of attendees from all around the world learned not only the fundamentals of quantum computing but also experienced with IBM’s Qiskit through daily lectures and lab sessions.
I had come across with this event on Twitter and registered for the event without losing any time. Due to the massive interest to the event and for the purpose of maintaining high quality and access to mentors, all applications for the QGSS have been converted to the pre-event registration. On the second call for the registration which happened on July 10th, I had succeeded to sign up for the event so that I could attend both live lectures and labs.
Communicating with Qiskitters: Discord channel
The communication with other peers and mentors is done through a Discord channel. Discord hosted numerous subgroups for lab discussions, regional study groups, announcements, lectures as well as career related topics. The pace and the quality of the community interaction was awesome, and everybody out there was trying not to leave any question unanswered.
Live Quantum Computing Lectures on Crowdcast
Crowdcast was used to broadcast live lectures. Usually hosted by lovely Brian Ingmanson, these lectures were watched live by thousands of people despite their time zone differences. From Singapore, I followed up the lectures from 9 pm to 12 am while sipping my black tea, and took notes on my sleek notebook that I bought for the QGSS.
In the first two lectures, Elisa Bäumer introduced the fundamental concepts of qubits, quantum gates, circuits as well as quantum teleportation protocol (Her Medium article is here). In the following two lectures, Abe Asfaw covered the fundamentals of Shor’s prime factorization algorithm and showed how it is related to quantum period finding problem.
On the last lecture of the first week, we were introduced to quantum error correction with a 3-hour lecture given by James Wootton. After he explained the fundamental quantum error correction concepts such as encoding / decoding quantum information and syndrome measurements via repetition codes, he focused on the concept of surface codes implemented in a 2D lattice of code qubits. The lecture gave me insights about why the emphasis on the field is on quantum error correction. The cost of implementing a single logical qubit via lots of imperfect physical qubits is one of the bottlenecks to be solved for today’s noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices.
The second (and also the last) week of the summer school was started with Zlatko Minev’s presentation on the physics of superconducting circuits. In the quantum harmonic oscillator picture, we reviewed circuit quantum electrodynamics of a transmon qubit. The lectures were a good mix of intuition with beautiful physics. After sharing a quote from Asher Peres who said
“Quantum phenomena do not occur in a Hilbert space, they occur in a laboratory.”
Zlatko Minev focused on control, noise and measurement related aspects of a transmon qubit in his second lecture.
The last two lectures were on quantum chemistry. In their lectures, Antonio Mezzacapo first reviewed the second quantization notation and proceeded to basics of fermion to qubit mappings to simulate molecular Hamiltonians. He then gave a broad overview of variational principle and optimization algorithms used in variational quantum eigensolver (VQE). In the follow up lecture of the quantum chemistry part, Abhinav Kandala showed how to solve qubit Hamiltonian for H2 and LiH using VQE while considering the simulation accuracy trade-off governed by decoherence and circuit depth aspects of the circuit.
Lab sessions: Jupyter notebooks
The live lectures are followed by broadcast of lab work recordings. Since it was around 1 am in Singapore time zone, I tackled the lab sessions in the following morning. There were a total of 9 lab sessions covering lots of quantum information science concepts ranging from quantum teleportation protocols, Shor’s algorithm, Grover’s algorithm, quantum error correction to Rabi and Ramsey experiments to characterize a qubit. The last two lab sessions were related to quantum chemistry simulations via VQE. Even if the simulated molecules are yet to be complex, it is really exciting to witness that quantum computers indeed evolved to a stage where they are able to simulate the ground state energy of molecules as once Richard Feynman had pointed out.
The all lab sessions except lab 7 and 8 (as these two were freebies for everyone) were graded. Lab students who completed the lab exercises with a cumulative score of ≥65% will be receiving a certificate of completion. I look forward to receive mine 🎓!
🎊Hurray! We have graduated !
The commencement of the QGSS was done via a live career panel on Youtube. Moderated by Amira Abbas, panelists consisting of prominent researchers of the field shared their thoughts on skills that are important for pursuing a career in quantum computing. Amira’s question on crazy predictions on the future of quantum computing, I really enjoyed the response of Abe about the hope that everyone in the world can contribute to the quantum computing. I believe the spread of connectivity and the adoption of open source philosophy would turn this hope into reality.
I am really glad to have the opportunity to dive into the quantum computation via high-quality lecture series and hands-on lab sessions. I appreciate all the genuine effort of all who assisted in organizing such a massive online teaching event. What made this adventure even more exciting was that you had the possibility to discuss your ideas with other enthusiastic attendees from various academic/professional backgrounds and countries. I suggest every quantum computing enthusiast to be a part of this growing and vivid community. As described by Huang Junye, Qiskit Advocates program is a good chance for those who seeks a supportive environment with a global network of experts. Hope to be a part of other Qiskit events / projects in the future!
