Check Out These Awesome Projects From The Qiskit Advocate Mentorship Program
By Kiran Johns, Co-op — IBM Quantum & Qiskit
This year, we launched the Qiskit Advocates Mentorship Program to provide skill development and professional growth for those interested in the quantum computing industry. Today, we are excited to share some of the projects that Qiskit Advocates have been working on.
Qiskit Advocates are members of an exclusive, global program that supports some of the Qiskit community’s most active contributors from over 30 countries. Advocates get special access to Qiskit core members, take on projects to improve the Qiskit community, and gain recognition from IBM. You can read more about the Qiskit Advocates program here.
The three month long mentorship program helps Advocates gain hands-on quantum computing experience through projects completed with the guidance of IBM Quantum and Qiskit experts. The program helps advocates develop skills in areas including programming, quantum information science, and technical writing. The program also provides opportunities for professional skills development and growth in the quantum industry. The Qiskit advocates gain experience in a variety of domains, including quantum machine learning, quantum chemistry, quantum finance, quantum games, and more.
Each mentor is an expert in a particular domain who guides and supports their mentees to complete their selected project. The mentors and mentees meet regularly to report the progress and get feedback about the projects.
“I am learning a lot of things that are useful both in and out of the project. My mentor, Luciano Bello, offers the right balance between suggesting me to do things and asking for my suggestions on doing things. He is up and available for questions anytime. Working with him pushes me to explore and work more on the project.”, said mentee Tharrmashastha SAPV.
The mentors predefined the projects as GitHub issues, and applicants listed their project preferences based on their interest areas. Applicants were also free to propose projects that they wanted to work on. Below you’ll find a few of the projects the advocates are developing. Click here to learn about the other projects that the advocates are contributing to.
Hearing Quantum Evolution
Mentor — James Weaver, Mentees — Abhigyan Mishra, Samuel Choi
James Weaver is a Quantum Developer Advocate in the IBM Quantum Community Team and is especially interested in music composition. Weaver is working with mentees Abhigyan Mishra, a final year computer science student at Delhi University, India, and Samuel Choi, a Computer Science student at Washington State University, to provide a new way to understand quantum algorithms by synthesizing an audio wave from a circuit. These Qiskit Advocates are developing a standalone platform that accepts a quantum circuit and generates beautiful music by mapping the unitary matrices obtained during the evolution of the system’s quantum states into an audio waveform. They hope that this project will help others understand quantum circuits in a unique way.
“Music was pretty new to me and I had trouble understanding how quantum computing and music relates. Working with James has helped me to get a better understanding, and now we have a clear idea on what we want to accomplish,” said Mishra. Meanwhile, Choi was simply excited to be working with Weaver. “James has been one of my role models, and the best part of the mentorship program was getting a chance to work with him. He’s the reason that I started learning quantum computing,” said Choi.
Quantum Neural Network section for Qiskit Textbook Quantum Machine Learning Chapter
Mentor — Anna Phan, Mentee — Antonio Macaluso
Anna Phan, a Research Scientist in IBM Research Australia and an expert in Quantum Machine Learning, is mentoring Qiskit Advocate and a Machine Learning Software Engineer Antonio Macaluso on a project to introduce the concepts of Quantum Neural Networks in the Qiskit Textbook. The chapters will supply readers with a basic understanding of the quantum computing concepts necessary to get started with quantum machine learning. The chapter will include information on building Quantum Neural Networks (QNN) from scratch using Qiskit, the architecture of QNNs, and various techniques to optimize it.
“One of the reasons that I chose this project is because I wanted to contribute back to the community and share the knowledge that I have,” said Macaluso.
Quantum Machine Learning is still in its infancy, but researchers hope that it might speed up existing classical machine learning algorithms. More quantum computing researcher who understand QML might help us discover new exciting applications — and we hope the chapter will also help set the proper expectations for those hoping to enter this often-hyped field.
Arithmetic Circuit Library
Mentor — Julien Gacon, Mentee — Manjula Gandhi, Mantas Čepulkovskis
Quantum programmers often rely on low-level qubit operations, like the Pauli gates or the Hadamard gates, in order to construct algorithms. However, algorithm developers might find it strenuous if they had to implement the same bits of code again and again. This is why Qiskit Advocates Manjula Gandhi, an Associate Professor at Coimbatore Institute of Technology, India, and Mantas Čepulkovskis, a Data Scientist at IBM, are working with Julien Gacon to build an arithmetic circuit library for Qiskit, making algorithm writing easier. Programmers can use the circuits included in this project as a toolbox to build other advanced algorithms.
Some of the circuits included in the library include the ripple-carry adder and QFT-based adder, which programmers can use for simple arithmetic addition of values in quantum registers. Other circuits in the library include subtractors and multipliers.
“Since my main job is not quantum related, working on this project helped me learn a lot and get motivated about contributing to open-source projects,”said Čepulkovskis. Meanwhile, Gandhi was excited to bring what she’s learned back to her students.”The Qiskit Advocates program is full of opportunities and I’m really happy to be a part of the mentorship program. My students have promised me that they will clear the test this year to become a Qiskit Advocate themselves.”
The Qiskit Advocates Mentorship Program is just one of the many benefits of becoming a Qiskit advocate. For those of you hoping to become advocates yourselves, we are excited to announce that the applications for the next batch of advocates will be opening soon. Check out the application guide here, and fill out this form to get notified when the application opens.
This blog post was written by mentee Kiran Johns and mentor Ryan Mandelbaum as part of the project “Find and write recurring blog posts about Qiskitter work” in the mentorship program.
