Written by: Qiskit Community on behalf of the entire Qiskit team
What is Qiskit Camp?
TLDR:
You might have seen some highlights of Qiskit Camp on Twitter but keep reading to get the inside scoop of what it is, who attended, and how you can get in on the next one.
Qiskit held its first Qiskit Camp, which brought together the growing community of developers, physicists, educators, researchers, and students working on quantum computing for a 3 day event in New York and Vermont.
In New York, we listened to some of the Qiskit Award Winners and IBM Researchers talk about the various projects and research going into quantum computing. The award winners were selected last year based off of 4 different challenges: Teach Me Quantum Award, Teach Me Qiskit Award, IBM Q Best Paper Award, Qiskit Developer Challenge.
Then we broke off into two groups, one dedicated to learning Qiskit through several hands-on sessions and another group focused on collaborating with other attendees and IBM researchers on some of the open projects in Qiskit today like OpenPulse, improvements to the Transpiler, and additions to Aer.
After lunch, a tour of some quantum hardware, and a packed second lunch, we were off to Vermont for a 24 hackathon.
Who attended?
TLDR: 135 people with different backgrounds and diverse set of interests
This invite-only event hosted 135 people from around the world with a representation from 19 countries, 48 universities, 9 research institutions, and 5 quantum startups. During the hackathon, 26 teams formed to work on a wide variety of projects including the development of standard circuit benchmarks, solving graph coloring problems, building a quantum pong game, and much more.
What were some of the results?
TLDR: Awesome results. Awesome people. Awesome projects.
Meeting all of the people in this community was by far the most invaluable part of this event. The two winning groups are a great representation of the diverse group who attended Qiskit Camp.
Three judges (Jay Gambetta, Sabrina Maniscalco, and Javad Shabani) were tasked with selecting a winner after all the teams presented their results. The judging panel selected qGradients as the winner. This project sought to improve convergence rates in hybrid quantum-classical variational forms.
In addition to the choice of the judges, there was a community choice award which established the favorite of the hackathon attendees. The community choice award went to the Purple Qubits team who significantly reduced the barrier to entry for quantum computing by developing an augmented reality application for understanding a qubit and gates.
These two winning projects worked on two very different yet equally complex problems and are a great representation of the folks in attendance. You do not need a PhD in quantum information to be a part of this community and the barrier to entry is constantly being lowered.
After the event, a short survey was sent out to attendees in order to understand how this Camp enhanced their knowledge of Qiskit and the larger field of quantum computation. The majority of folks left this 3-day event with significant improvements in their understanding of Qiskit and with projects that they are eager to continue with. Over 90% of attendees indicated that they are interested in continuing the projects that they began at the hackathon.
Interested in checking out and contributing to some of these projects? Check them out below.
When is the next one?
TLDR: Soon
The Qiskit team put a lot of effort into making this hackathon a success. However, nothing is perfect, especially the first attempt at an event of this magnitude. We are currently taking a look at some of the feedback for this event and looking at how we can improve future events.
So.. yes. There will be another Qiskit Camp. When? For now, the best answer we can give is soon.
If you are interested in joining us for the next Qiskit Camp, give this piece a clap! Participants are invited based on their contributions to the community, and it’s never too late to get started.
How can I get started with Qiskit today?
- Get started with Qiskit
- Ready to Contribute? Try out some of our good first issues.
- The community is here if you get stuck!
Interested in contributing to some of the hackathon projects? Check them out below:
- Writing standardized benchmarks
- Q-music
- Optimization for UCCSD
- Centered QFT
- Optimization for Quantum Chemistry Circuits
- Library of Circuits for Arithmetic
- Noise Mitigation
- Quantum Art Generation
- Bayesian Tomography
- Quantum Flappy Game
- Quantum Pong
- A Quantum Walk
- Emulating Braiding on an Ising chain
- Max-cut with Grover
- QAOA and graph coloring
- Shor’s Algorithm
- W-state generation & performance
- Extending the tomography modules
- Approximating Continuous-Variables on Qiskit
- Methods for state preparation via Quantum compression
