What You Missed At The 2021 Qiskit Global Summer School
By Amira Abbas, Quantum Research Advocate at IBM
For a second year in a row, the Qiskit Global Summer School (QGSS) was the world’s largest virtual quantum computing event. This year’s QGSS sold out almost immediately, and the 5000-plus registered participants got the chance to study quantum computing with a focus on quantum machine learning (QML). The participation and positive feedback was astonishing, and if you were unable to attend this year, here’s how it went:
What was covered?
This year, the QGSS organizers decided to hone in on QML given the immense interest in the topic generally. They hoped to equip students with a pragmatic view of what’s actually possible in this arguably-quite-hyped field. The course began with a recap of quantum computing and an introduction to machine learning, followed by a deep dive into QML theory, and finally, an introduction to applications using real quantum computers. The school was led by some of IBM’s leading researchers in QML, and consisted of 20 live lectures plus 5 lab sessions where participants got to apply what they had learned using Qiskit, the open-source quantum computing software library. Lastly, a discussion among a panel of experts around the future of QML concluded the two week event.
A growing community
It’s quite amazing to see how rapidly the quantum community is growing. The diversity and increasing level of participation in the summer school this year is a huge testament to the Qiskit community’s mission to lower the barrier to entry to quantum computing. We had participants from over 111 countries learning in 9 different languages! Not to mention, students with backgrounds from high school all the way to industry professionals all gathered to learn about QML. The overall completion of labs and certificates awarded increased by more than 1000 participants from last year. None of this could have been possible without the help of our incredible mentors from all around the world.
And it didn’t end there! The community’s engagement via Twitter, Slack, LinkedIn and Discord continued to soar after the summer school, with local communities forming to foster the spurred interest in all things quantum.
Can I access the content?
The 2021 summer school content has been released and is now available to all! This includes 23+ hours of recorded lectures and lab run-through sessions, 5 applied lab exercises, lecture notes, additional learning resources, and FAQs for each segment. I offer a special thanks to the volunteer students who helped compile these additional resources and FAQs from Discord — again demonstrating the strength of the Qiskit community.
What’s next?
While QGSS 2021 was a great learning experience with high impact, the quantum computing environment is rather fast paced and new developments are constantly underway. So, stay tuned for the next QGSS, where we aim to continue to educate just about anyone who is interested in the latest research, applications and hardware advancements in quantum computing.
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