 From around the globe, it's theCUBE! Covering Upgrade 2020, the NTT Research Summit, presented by NTT Research. Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. Welcome back to our ongoing coverage of Upgrade 2020. It's the NTT Research Lab Summit, and it's all about upgrading reality. Heavy-duty basic research around a bunch of very smart topics, and we're really excited to have our next guest to kind of dive in. I promise you it'll be the deepest conversation you have today, unless you watch a few more of these segments. So our first guest, we're welcoming back, Kazuhiro Ghome, he's the president and CEO of NTT Research. Kazuh, great to see you. Good to see you. And joining him is Yoshi Yamamoto. He is a fellow for NTT Research and also the director of the Physics and Informatics Lab. Yoshi, great to meet you as well. Nice to meet you. So I was teasing the crew earlier, Yoshi, when I was doing some background work on you and I pulled up your Wikipedia page and I was like, okay, guys, to read this thing and tell me what Yoshi does. You have been knee-deep in quantum computing and all of the supporting things around quantum, heavy-duty kind of next-gen compute. I wonder if you can kind of share a little bit, you know, your mission running this labs and really thinking so far in advance of what we kind of experience and what we work with today and this new kind of basic research. NTT has started the research on quantum computing back in 1986, 87. So it is already more than 30 years or the company invested there in this field are here. We have accumulated a lot of sort of ideas, knowledge, technologies are in this field and there probably it is a right time to establish the connection, close connection to our US academia. And in this way, we will jointly sort of advance our research capabilities toward the future. The goal is still I think a long way to go, but by collaborating with American universities and students which are accelerating the NTTs in this area. So you've been moving, you've been working on quantum for 30 years. I had no idea that that research has been going on for such a very, very long time. We hear about it in the news and we hear about it at a place like IBM and Accenture has a neat little demo that they have in the new Salesforce period. What makes quantum so exciting and the potential to work so hard for so long and what is it going to eventually open up for us when we get it to commercial availability? The honest answer to that question is, we don't know yet, still I think after 30 years, I think hardworking on quantum physics and computing. Still we don't know, they are killing applications or even I think we feel that all the current efforts are not necessarily I think are practical from the engineering viewpoint. So it is still a long way to go, but the reason why NTT has been continuously working on the subject is basically the very sort of a bottom or a fundamental side of the present day communication and computing technology. There is always a quantum principle and it is very important for us to understand the quantum principles and their quantum limit for communication and computing are first of all. And if we are lucky, maybe we can make a breakthrough for the next generation of communication and the computing technology based on quantum principles. But the second one is really, I think, just a guess and hope, research as hope, nothing very solid here. Right. Well, Kazoo, I want to go to you because it really highlights the difference between kind of basic hardcore fundamental research versus building new applications or building new products or building new things that are going to be commercially viable and you can build an ROI and you can figure out what the customers are going to buy. It really reflects that this is very different. This is very, very basic with very, very long lead times and very difficult execution. So when, you know, for NTT to spend that money and invest that time and people for long, long periods of time with not necessarily a clean ROI at the end, that really, it's really an interesting statement in terms of this investment and thinking about something big, like upgrading reality. Yeah, so that's what this, yeah, exactly that you talked about the basic research is and from NTT's perspective, we feel like we, as Dr. Yamamoto, he just mentioned that we've been investing into the 30 plus years of time in this field. And, you know, and we, well, I could talk about why this is important. And some of them is that, you know, that the current computer that everybody uses, we are certainly, well, there might be some more areas of improvement, but we will someday in, I don't know, four years, five years, 10 years down the road, there might be some big roadblock in terms of more capacity, more, you know, powers and stuff. We may run into some issues. So we need to be prepared for those kinds of things. So yes, we are in a way fortunate that we have a great team to, and a special expertise in this field. And, you know, we have, we can spend some resource towards that. So why not? We should just do that in preparation for that big wall, so to speak. I guess we are expecting to kind of run into five, 10 years down the road. So let's just looking into it, invest some resource into it. So that's where we are here. And again, from my perspective, we are very fortunate that we have all the resources that we can do. That's great, right? Did they give it to you? Dr. Yonma Mota, I wonder if you can share what it's like in terms of the industry and academic working together. You look at the presentations that are happening here at the event. All the great academic institutions are very well represented, very deep papers. You were at NTT, you spent some time at Stanford. Talk about how it is working between this joint development with great academic institutions as well as a great company. Our traditionally are in the United States. There have been always two complementary opportunities for training next generation scientists and engineers. One opportunity is junior faculty position or postdoc position in academia where main emphasis is education. The other opportunity is junior researcher position in industrial lab where apparently the focus emphasis is research. And eventually we need two types of intellectual leaders are from two different career paths. And when they sort of work together with a strong educational background and the strong research background maybe we can now make our wonderful breakthrough, I think. So it is very important to sort of connect the here between two institutions. However, in the recent past, particularly after Bell Lab disappeared, the here basic research activity in industrial lab decreases substantially. And we hope NTT research can contribute to sort of the building of fundamental science in the industry side. And for that purpose are the here close collaboration with research universities are very important. So the first task we have been working so far is to build up this industry academia connection. Well, huge compliment to NTT to continue to fund the basic research. Because as you said, there's a lot of companies that were in it before and are not in it anymore. And when you often read the history of computing and a lot of different things, it goes back to a lot of times some basic research. And just for everyone to know what we're talking about I want to read a couple of sessions that you can attend and learn within Dr. Yamamoto's space. So it's coherent nonlinear dynamics, combinatorial optimization. That's just one session. I love it. Physics successfully implements Lagrange multiplier optimization. I love it. Photonics accelerators for machine learning. I mean, it's so interesting to read basic research titles because it's like a micro focus of a subset. It's not quantum computing. It's all these little smaller pieces of the quantum computing stack and then obviously very deep and rich deep dives into those topics. And so again, Kazu, this is the first one that's going to run after the day, the first physics lab. But then you've got the cryptography and information security lab as well as the medical and health information lab. You started with physics and informatics. Is that the history? Is that the favorite child? Are you going to lead that day off on day two of the event? We did draw a straw and then Dr. Yamamoto won it. Just kidding. But... Rochambeau, right? It's always fair. But certainly this quantum... Well, all the topics certainly are focuses that the basic research does definitely a commonality. But I think that quantum physics is in a way kind of very symbolic to kind of show that what the basic research is. And many people have many ideas associated with the term basic research. But I think that the quantum physics is certainly one of the strong candidates that the many people may think of. So, well, I think this is definitely a good place to start for this session from my perspective. Well, and it almost feels like that's kind of the foundational even for the other sessions, right? So, you talk about medical or you talk about cryptography and information. Still at the end of the day, there's going to be compute happening to drive those processes, whether it's looking at medical slides or trying to do diagnosis or trying to run a bunch of analysis against huge data sets, which then goes back to ultimately algorithms and ultimately compute and this opening up of this entirely different set of horsepower. So, Dr. Yamamoto, I'm just curious, how did you get started down this path of this crazy 30-year journey on quantum computing? The first quantum algorithm was invented by David Deutsch back in 1985. This particular algorithm turned out later, the complete failure. It was useful at all. And he spent the seven years actually to fix the loophole and invented their first successful algorithm. That was 1992. Even though the first algorithm was a complete failure, that paper actually created a lot of excitement among young scientists at NTT here, basically such love immediately after the paper appeared. And 1987 is actually, I think one year later, so this paper appeared. And we sort of agreed that maybe one of the interesting future direction is quantum information processing. And that's how it started. It's a spontaneous sort of our activity, I think among young scientists of late 20s and early 30s at the time. And what do you think, Dr. Yamamoto, that people should think about it? If again, if we're at a cocktail party, not with a bunch of people that intimately know the topic, how do you explain it to them? How should they think about this great opportunity around quantum that's kept you engaged for decades and decades and decades? Are these here? The quantum is everywhere. Namely, I think this world is fundamentally based on and created from quantum substrate. The at the very bottom of our sort of world are consists of our electrons and photons and atoms and those fundamental particles sort of behave according to quantum rule. And which is very different from classical reality are namely the world where we are living every day. The relevant question which is also interesting is how our classical world or classical reality are surfaces from the general or universal quantum substrate where our intuition never works. And that sort of a fundamental question actually opens the possibility, I think, by utilizing quantum principle or quantum classical sort of a crossover principle we can revolutionize the current limitation in communication and computation. That's basically the start point here. We start from quantum substrate and the classical world surfaces on top of quantum substrate as exceptional case. And we build the sort of our communication and the computing machine in this exceptional sort of a world. But if we dig into our quantum substrate the new opportunities is open for us or not. That's some of the fundamental question, I think. It's great. Very... Well, yeah, we can't go too deep because you'll lose me long before you get to the bottom of the story. But I really appreciate it and I'm causing back to you. This is your guy's first event. It's a really bold statement, right? Upgrade reality. I just wonder when you look at the registrants and you look at the participation and what do you kind of anticipate? How much of the anticipation is kind of people in the business kind of celebrating and kind of catching up to the latest research and how much of it is going to be really inspirational for those next, you know, early 20-somethings who are looking to grab, you know, an exciting field to hitch their wagon to and to come away after this to say, wow, this is something that really hooked me and I want to get down and really kind of advance this technology a little bit further, advance this research a little bit further. So, yeah, from my point of view for this event I'm expecting there are quite wide range of people I'm hoping that are interested in to this event. Like you mentioned, those are the business people who wants to know what NTT does and then what, you know, what a spectrum of NTT does. And then, and also, especially like today's events and onward, very specific to each topic and we're going to very deep dive and so to this session especially in a lot of participants from the academia's world for each subject, including students and then some other students and professors and teachers and all those people as well. So, that's my expectations and then from the program arrangement perspective that's always something in my mind that how do we address those different kind of segments of the people and we are all welcoming, by the way for those people. So, to me, so yesterday was the general sessions where I'm kind of expecting more that the business and then perhaps some other more general people who just curious what NTT is doing and so instead of going too much details but just to give you the ideas that what's that our vision is and also, you know, a little bit of flavor is a good word or not but give you some ideas of what we are trying to do and then the better from here for the next three days, obviously for the academic people and then those who are the experts in each field probably day one is not quite deep enough not quite addressing what they want to know. So, day two, three, four other days that designed for that kind of requirements and expectations. Right, and are most of the presentations built on academic research that's been submitted to journals and other formal, you know, peer review and peer publication types of activities. So this is all very formal, very professional and very prior accessible to people that know where to find this information. Yeah, that's great. Well, I have learned a ton about NTT and a ton about this crazy basic research that you guys are doing and a ton about the fact that I need to go back to school if I ever want to learn any of this stuff because it's a fascinating tale and it's great to know as we've seen these other basic research companies not necessarily academic, but companies kind of go away. We mentioned Xerox PARC and Bell Labs that you guys have really picked up that mantle not necessarily picked it up you're already doing it yourselves but really continuing to carry that mantle so that we can make these fundamental basic building block breakthroughs to take us to the next generation and as you say, upgrade the future. So again, congratulations. Thanks for sharing the story and good luck with all those presentations. Thank you very much. Thank you. Alright, Yoshi, Kazoo, I'm Jeff. NTT Upgrade 2020. We're going to upgrade the future. Thanks for watching. See you next time.