 Hi, Dario. Hello. How are you? Can you introduce yourself for us? I'm Dario Guil. I'm the vice president in charge of artificial intelligence and quantum computing and IBM research. And what exactly do you do here? Well, I manage and I run an organization that focus on pushing the frontiers of artificial intelligence for IBM and for our clients. And we are also responsible for creating and commercializing quantum computing, IBM Q. So which one do you love more, AI or quantum? That's a tricky question. I would say I suffer from a love entanglement between the two. Ooh, what's that on your desk? Oh, this is a calculator. It's actually a piece of art that my friend Andy Aaron makes. And he refurbishes all calculators and they have a very funny contraction on how they perform the calculation, but art. So, compared to other technology revolutions, where are we in the information age? Well, if we compared it to say the industrial revolution, I would say we're in the mid-19th century. You know, seminal breakthroughs have occurred, you know, this impacting broadly the economy, but we still haven't seen the full consequences of what IT is going to do for the world. Can you explain quantum computing to me? I have to go to a meeting now, but I would recommend that you go to the lab and talk to Jerry Chow. Hey, Jerry. Hey. Where are we right now? We're in one of our quantum computing research labs. How did you get into quantum computing? Well, my father was a physicist that got me into physics, and then I was really intrigued by quantum physics. What's the most common myth about quantum you ever heard or read? Really the most common myth is that all of your bank accounts are going to be in danger because of quantum computing. Well, it's good to know that isn't true. Do you have any good words to live by? I'd say that, let's see. Breathe. Always take the time out to breathe. Can you tell me a quantum joke? No. What's the best lunch option in the cafeteria at the Yorktown lab? Any sandwich made by Joel. What do you collaborate with most frequently at work? That would have to be Jay Gameda. And if you two had a buddy comedy, what would it be called? Jay and Jerry's Quantum Adventure. What's scarier, giving a TED talk or trying to get qubits to hold their quantum states? Cupid coherence and qubit states. Where do you see yourself in five years? Still leading this effort and pushing forward with our quantum computing. And Dario said you could explain quantum computing to us. Can you? Well, actually, Sarah Sheldon can. Hey, Sarah. Hi. What are you working on right now? I'm looking at one of our devices that we just prepared to cool down in one of our fridges. It was just mounted and wire bonded. What's that sound in here? That's the sound of the cryo coolers, which are the first stage in cooling down the dilution refrigerators that we use to cool our quantum devices. Can you show me what a qubit looks like? Actually, you can see from this chip right here, this is a seven qubit device. Our qubits are superconducting circuits that are fabricated on silicon wafers. What's your current non-scientific obsession? Well, when I have a free moment, I've been catching up on the good place on TV. I'll have to check it out. Is everything quantum? Technically, if you look at things on a small enough scale, everything is quantum. But in our everyday experience, we don't really see the quantum effects of nature because we're not looking at such a small scale. It's actually why it's very difficult to have an intuitive sense of how quantum works. What's it like to be a female in the field of quantum computing? Well, you get asked that question all the time. In our group at IBM, my colleagues are really great, but we have very few women in quantum. But I think there are so many opportunities to be a part of quantum computing effort from engineering and physics and science. We need to make sure that we include women in all of those opportunities. Can you give me a fun fact about quantum computing? Well, one fact which kind of has to do with the work that I do is thinking about how to represent a quantum state when you have a lot of qubits. So with 50 qubits, if you were to make a bar graph of all the possible states of that qubit, and each state was one pixel, you would need a computer screen that was over 100 million miles wide to represent all possible states. Wow, that is a really big computer screen. How long have you worked at IBM? I've been here for four years. And what's been your biggest accomplishment in your time here? The projects that I work on mostly involve trying to calibrate our quantum operations, the gates that are part of our quantum algorithms, and to characterize the errors in the system. So my work has contributed to increasing the two qubit gate fidelities and better understanding the noise. Can you explain quantum computing to me? Jerry said to ask you. Actually, I should really get back to work, but you can talk to Honey. You should ask Pat Wisniev. Let me walk you over to his lab. Can you introduce yourself for us? My name is Honey Paek, and I'm a scientist at TJ Watson Research Center. And what do you work on? I build the quantum devices, and then I design the quantum architecture. When you were a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up? I always wanted to be a scientist, but then it's more like a space scientist or an astronaut. If you were a quantum superhero, what powers would you have? I like to have a superpower to entangle anything I want as long as I want. What would that allow us to do? That it probably give us a quantum computer like a right away. What's your favorite stress reliever? I like to watch Marvel movies. I recently watched the Black Panther, which was awesome. How do you pronounce this word? So my British friends, scientist friends like to call it as a cheese kit, but a lot of people call it a kiss kit. What is it? It is the quantum software kit to develop the short-term circuits for near-term quantum applications. Do you have any hidden talents? I like to draw cartoons. What excites you the most about your job right now? So building a quantum computer requires the most advanced science and technology. And tackling the toughest technological challenges together with my colleagues at IBM and the community at IBM Q Experience, that's really fun. How many experiments are running on the IBM Q Experience right now? So far, there are 2.5 million experiments run at IBM Q Experience. What's the coolest thing you've done with the IBM Q Experience? So my colleagues just put up the tutorial to calculate the hydrogen atom energy. And that was really fun to calculate that using IBM Q Experience. If a qubit had a flavor, what flavor would it be? I think it would be spicy. How does IBM's 50 qubit prototype make you feel? That's a really important step towards to build the IBM full-towel and quantum computer. And I'm really proud of that IBM actually accomplished that achievement. Hi. Hi, Bob. Can we come in and ask you some questions about quantum computing? Sure, but let's talk out here. It's a lot quieter. Awesome. Can I call you the quantum whiz? If that makes you happy. What was your first job at IBM? Back in the 1980s, I worked on the displays for notebook computers. When was the first time you observed quantum in real life or quantum IRL? So the first time I saw quantum in real life was back in high school. We had a pocket spectrometer that we could look through at a hydrogen line. And the hydrogen lines are these distinct razor-sharp lines in the spectra, unlike ordinary light. And back in the 1880s, that's the first time humans had seen quantum events. And it was so cool. That's what caused Neil Bohr to start thinking about how atoms are really constructed. So we've been looking at quantum since the 1880s? Yep. Yes. And we still don't understand a lot about it. What's your favorite part of a quantum computer? The payload, the actual qubits themselves. Making them with enough fidelity to useful things, that's where it's at. Cats or dogs? Dogs. What about quantum do you still not understand? Everything. We don't know why it works the way it does. We just know it works this way. What advice would you give to a student interested in quantum? Oh, so learning the scientific method, observing, building models, using those models to actually create things that work, that's what we do. Do you listen to music in your lab? Yes, we do, because it's really noisy in there. Personally, I like acoustic alchemy, Mozart, and Holst. Nice. What would you do with a fault-tolerant quantum computer? We change the world, because a fully fault-tolerant quantum computer is going to be able to do things we can't even imagine now. But way before that, as we're entering the era soon of approximate quantum computing, we'll be able to design new molecules, we'll be able to do optimization, we'll be able to do certain aspects of machine learning, and that will already be transformational in some areas. Can we make up a secret handshake that will allow me to get into the lab some day? Sure, but it has to involve superposition and entanglement. Can you explain quantum computing? Only experimentally, and it's something that the fundamental axioms of quantum computing all come down to observations that we've made and how we explain them with models. We don't know why the universe is built this way, it just is.