100 seminars and 130 watch-years: Qiskit Seminar Series connects the research community on YouTube

By Zlatko Minev

Science, education, and personal growth thrive on exposure to new ideas, fresh discussions, and unexpected questions.

These ingredients fuel our quantum community. But March, 2020 drastically upended this — and so, the Qiskit Seminar Series was born. Now, in anticipation of our hundredth episode, we felt it time to take a look back.

Disruption. Most of us, myself included, were suddenly isolated, torn from our usual connections. We lost the usual rich exposure to fresh ideas spurred by visitors, seminars, conferences, and discussions. We lost the ability to easily connect with other researchers to tackle big challenges… and much more. Carl Jung put it well, “The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances; if there is any reaction, both are transformed.”

Mission. We asked: How could we transform the negative into a positive? Could we use this moment to change the way we exchange ideas freely and openly? Or to change the way we connect the aspiring students to leading experts, or how we connect researchers with the cutting edge in quantum?

I got to work with the Qiskit Community team on this mission. In a lightning two weeks, we kicked off the first episode of the new digital IBM Quantum Information Science Seminar Series. We couldn’t have anticipated what would happen next.

Spirit and philosophy. It was crucial that the Seminar Series adhere to the Qiskit spirit and philosophy. Qiskit is an open-source community. For many, Qiskit is their entry point into the world of quantum. Many of us create Qiskit’s educational materials and events to help build bridges into this world for our newest members. With the seminar, we wanted to craft and extend this spirit of Qiskit — to create a digital forum where anyone from any place could connect and ask questions of the world-leading authorities on any quantum subject. We wanted to bridge fields, ages, and to exchange and debate ideas live.

I always start by asking: “Folks, where’s everyone tuning in from today?” In response, people list countries from around the world: India, Oregon, Denmark, UK, Japan, California, Bulgaria, Brazil, Israel, New York, … — so many places, so many time zones! Speakers too get a unique ride. Our A/V team and I usually hear: “My talk is timed to 45 min.” Then, 1 hour and 15 minutes later, their talk is far from over and questions and discussion from the avid and passionate folks on the YouTube chat keeps us on our toes.

Results. So how is it going so far?

· 100+ seminars

· 244,461+ hours of total viewer watch time

· Nearly 1 million viewers (people who watched the video)

· Nearly 26 million impressions (people who saw the video in their feed)

To put it in perspective, the typical academic seminar we attended in university averaged about 20–30 folks in the audience. The Seminar Series instead averages 8,600 per seminar, with an average watch time of 2,469 hours.

We never expected 244,461 hours of quantum science — that is equivalent to 130 years of a person’s work life [i.e., full-time equivalent (FTE), 244461/(40 hours/ *47 weeks/yr)].

Students and researchers shared with us the impact the seminar had in their research, career, and life, sometimes determining their field and advisor. “I was looking for Ph.D. research options and I learned about a professor’s research from one of the seminars,” said Tanvir Masum, a Ph.D. student. “I emailed him, obtained admission to the Physics Ph.D. program, and am now working in that professor’s lab on the topic I am most passionate about.”

Another Doctoral Researcher from Utah, Onri Benally shared with us that the “[Qiskit Seminar] is definitely worth its weight in gold and is something I greatly value.” He continued that it “has inspired some of my research presentations at work… and continues to enable me to keep having afternoon quantum discussions.” Many other folks — see LinkedIn and Twitter — shared sentiments like “I love the seminar,” “Qiskit Seminar is awesome,” “it meant a lot to me,” ”It is absolutely amazing.”

Celebrating the 100th seminar — this Friday. For our hundredth episode, our very own Dr. Ali Javadi-Abhari will give a special seminar in the spirit of open science. Ali will cover how to compile a quantum program for hardware. Ali will touch on the development of the open-source quantum information kit (Qiskit) project to show how the compiler performs its magic.

To commemorate the 100 episodes, we will raffle out a special post-seminar meet and greet. Stay tuned for the raffle signup during the seminar!

We want your input: Let us know what ideas and suggestions you have in the comments for next steps with the seminar. Speakers to invite? How to find more ways to foster connections between both junior and senior researchers? newcomers and advanced experts? We’re all ears.

What next? We are thrilled that the Qiskit seminar has exceeded our dreams and opened the scientific community to connect across all stages, ages, and countries. We will continue to strengthen the bridge between academics and industry across the globe to promote innovation and education, to yield the best science and technology.

Now, after two years, we are happy to give a promotion to the seminar. Moving forward it is now a colloquium. We’re renaming it the IBM Quantum Information Science Colloquium Series.

Our deepest gratitude to you for being part of the journey, tuning in, supporting the mission. As always, tune in live next Friday at noon East time to ask and discuss questions live.

Thanks so much to Olivia Lanes, Clinton Herrick, David Rodriguez, Setareh Derakhshandeh, and Paul Searle for making all of this possible.