Feel the Rhythm of Quantum With Our Qiskit Hackathon Korea
Register here for Qiskit Hackathon Korea, a four day celebration of the South Korean quantum community starting February 16 at 10:00 KST. Teams of up to 5 can participate. This event is open to all South Korean community members, not just quantum experts. New learners and beginners are highly encouraged to apply! Click here for detailed rules and regulations.
양자 컴퓨터의 세상으로 여행을 떠날 준비가 되셨나요? 2021년 2월 16일부터 한국의 양자컴퓨터 커뮤니티와 함께 진행되는 4일간의 Qiskit Hackathon Korea! 등록은 여기!입니다. 최대 다섯명이 한 팀을 구성할 수 있습니다. 이벤트는 양자 컴퓨터 전문가 뿐만 아닌, 모든 한국인 커뮤니티 멤버에게 열려있습니다. 양자 컴퓨터 초보자와 입문자 역시 열렬히 환영합니다. 이곳을 클릭하여 자세한 규칙과 규정을 확인하세요.
By Soyoung Shin (신소영(Sophy)), Qiskit Advocate and Ph.D. candidate. Original Korean-language blog linked here.
Last year, South Korea showed off their many attractions to the world with the “Feel the Rhythm of Korea’’ video. This video has since been viewed over 200 million times across social media. The parts of this video that resonated the most for me personally were:
1. Its open-source distribution and access,
2. The content created by harmonizing various genres, and
3. Art forms connecting the past, present, and future.
I felt similarly when I first discovered quantum computing and Qiskit. Quantum computing is an extremely interdisciplinary field, full of cutting-edge research and development, having origins in the past with current work on the quantum stack in the era of noisy quantum devices, preparing us for a not-so-distant quantum future. The Qiskit project was similarly created by the collaborative efforts of developers with diverse backgrounds from all over the world, and today offers a variety of open-source tools and educational materials. This “rhythm” is why I personally relate to this field and community with a similar yet exceptional experience.
Joining the Qiskit Community
I first entered a Ph.D program in physics as both a mother and a student, balancing my home life with my studies. I was able to handle the workload, at first, but extenuating personal circumstances began to challenge my ability to continue. However, when I found Qiskit, I realized that I could begin studying quantum computing on my own.
Thanks to easily accessible open source learning materials, I was able to play around with the Qiskit toolkit and features and interact with quantum computers from home. I joined my first quantum computing event soon after starting, the May 4th Quantum Challenge in 2020. This introduced me to the extremely active and dynamic Qiskit community, who together solved these challenge questions collaboratively around the world.
The noble values of the Qiskit community, aiming for open community and open education, encouraged and empowered me to explore the field further. That’s when I decided to start building a Qiskit user group in South Korea.
Bringing the Qiskit Community to South Korea
I’ve been personally interested in cloud technology and machine learning for the past three years — two topics that are extremely popular in South Korea right now. I had already started a study group focused on these topics, and thought this was the perfect venue to start studying quantum computing as well. Our group consisted of students from a diverse set of backgrounds and educations, from high schoolers to engineering and architecture majors.
This past August, we created a #korean channel on Qiskit Slack as a workspace for Qiskitters in South Korea, where we started to share material and study together. We also joined the Qiskit Korean translation team, helping to localize documents and make them more approachable for Korean-speaking Qiskitters.
My involvement in the community continued to grow. I met even more quantum computing community members when I became a Qiskit Advocate, such as my colleagues and fellow advocates Hyunsoo and Saesun, who share similar goals of quantum community development in Korea as I do. Becoming an advocate also helped me continue my Ph.D, by changing my research focus to quantum information.
Our Advocate and South Korean communities increased little by little. At this point some of us, including myself, Hyunsoo, and Saesun, gathered the courage to participate in the Qiskit Hackathon Global. Hyunsoo and I volunteered as mentors, and a total of four Korean students joined the event as participants. Each student was able to work with fellow participants and community members, and one of them was even a member of a Community Choice Award Winning team. I worked as a mentor on two project teams, one with an idea that I pitched myself, and another that worked on a quantum chemistry project. While neither project was a podium finish, I met some really cool Qiskitters, learned more about the quantum chemistry world, and got to help work on the now-infamous Quantum Dadjoke bot.
The Qiskit Hackathon Global encouraged our budding community of Korean Qiskitters to start dreaming about our future. Now, our objective was to encourage more of our colleagues to join the Qiskit community and to attend the Quantum Challenge together. There still aren’t many quantum computing researchers or developers in South Korea, so even before the start of the event we needed to figure out how we’d be able to help other Koreans with this challenge. We decided to translate the contents of the challenge into Korean with several volunteers gathered from our community channel, create a Korean language lecture on the Grover’s algorithm for participants, and produce commentary and other materials on past challenge problems.
Introduction to Quantum Computing tutorial, made for and by Korean Qiskitters
When the event registration started, Hyunsoo and I started promoting it using social media to gather participants. Once the challenge began, we met in the #korean Slack Channel to complete it together, and also shared and celebrated the results of the challenge after the event. While I don’t know how many people from South Korea participated in the challenge, our #korean Slack channel now numbers over 70 Qiskitters, representing various different majors, professions, ages, and backgrounds. I’m amazed by how much we’ve been able to grow.
The journey from creating the Korean Qiskitter channel in August and completing the Quantum Challenge together in November gives me a feeling of how the traditional Korean patchwork, Jogakbo, is made. We represent different shapes, materials, and colors, but we connected, coexisted, and grew together to become a “masterpiece”.
Connecting generations and moving towards the future
Starting on Tuesday, February 16, 2021, we will be kicking off Qiskit Hackathon Korea — Feel the Rhythm of Quantum. We hope to celebrate the growth and enthusiasm of the Korean quantum computing community by hosting the very first Qiskit event in Korea to support the passion of local enthusiasts and experts.
The event is a four-day meetup in collaboration with the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) and Sungkyunkwan University (SKKU), with the hackathon itself implemented in a 24-hour sprint format. Participants can form teams of up to 5 members and either choose a recommended project or work on an idea of their own. The winning team will receive a prize worth USD 250.
The event will feature an impressive lineup of lecturers, mentors, and judges, as well as project support ranging from introductory level concepts to focused fields like quantum machine learning. The event will be accessible to participants from all kinds of backgrounds and areas of interest. Additionally, this will also be the very first Qiskit event featuring potential projects and support from Metal, the new Qiskit toolkit for quantum device design.
Now, we Korean Qiskitters are starting to dream even bigger. Starting with the hackathon, we wish to create more events and opportunities for our community with Qiskit. We dream of a collaborative event created by engineers and scientists together, an event in which seniors, juniors, and younger students work together on projects, communicate and connect with each other, and an event that opens endless possibilities to the future with everyone’s combined efforts. We are going to compose our rhythm through this hackathon, A rhythm that is open to everybody combined and moves between people, spanning generations into the future.
To all Qiskitters. Are you ready to feel the rhythm of quantum in Korea? The Korean Qiskitters are coming!
