 Hey, this is Christian Mukhti with another MVP Buzz Chat interview, and I'm here this afternoon with Sarah. Hey, thanks a lot for joining and talking. How are things going? Thank you for having me. Things are going pretty good. Enjoying the work from home model. Yeah. Were you working from home? Were you an office worker prior to this or? So I'm here in Seattle, and I work as a research engineer at Pensard Development, which is kind of an engineering consulting firm. And generally I do hardware development. So it's been kind of challenging to transition the work that I normally do in the lab and testing prototypes and stuff like that to making that work from home. Yeah, that's a lot of equipment you have to check out to. Yeah. We've been trying to trade because we only have so many sets of equipment in the lab, so that each engineer gets it for a week to work on what they need. Yeah, that is hard. You don't think about that. On a day-to-day basis, do you have pretty close quarters of the people that you were working with? I mean, is there not the ability to go and work out of the office for part of that? We potentially could, but with the full shelter in place order right now, we're not actually even allowed in the buildings. So unless it's like to stop a pipe from leaking. Yeah, right. That makes sense. Well, why don't we do this? Just to kind of understand, I know that so at a very high level, I'm trying to remember which event whether it was, I think it was Ignite, where Microsoft announced this is like three or four years ago, where they announced their Quantum Development Kit. And so that included the Quantum-focused programming language, so Q-Sharp, that had, of course, a bunch of Azure resources, and then other lists and libraries and tools and tutorials and that kind of stuff, which is out on, a lot of it is out on GitHub or all of it's out on GitHub. Yeah, it's almost all open source. Okay, were you involved with it back then, or did you start playing with the development kit at that time? I definitely, I started probably about two years ago, so just shortly after the launch. But yeah, so I'm really passionate about Quantum Technologies. I did my PhD actually in developing Quantum cryptography hardware, which generally involved melting things with high-powered lasers, so that was a plus. Well, that has that coolness factor. I've got, yeah, so anyway, well, start here. So what do people need to know about Quantum Computing? So we've read about it in magazines for years. I mean, remember talking about and joking about Quantum Computer, I think in like a Dilbert strip back in the mid-90s, has been around for a long time. And then what's Microsoft's role in this space? Yeah, so in probably the last five or so years, the field has really made an interesting transition wherein previously it was pretty much purely an academic endeavor. To now it is a largely commercial, like Microsoft is one of the biggest investors in, IBM is in there, Google's in there, Honeywell, like there's a wide variety of like money sources that are kind of pouring into actually commercially developing this, because we got to a point research-wise where it actually is kind of seemingly feasible to work with from a hardware perspective. So what is really neat about kind of the Microsoft approach is that they have this software stack that is, I mean, it's open source, but also by having a new language specifically designed for the Quantum hardware, it makes it a lot easier to kind of think about the algorithms that you want to write at a higher level. So a lot of the other tools and platforms kind of, you have to think more at like a gate level that think about like writing assembly or something like that for classical hardware. You have to think about exactly what operations you're doing, whereas by having a language that is kind of designed at another layer of abstraction, it makes it a lot easier to actually kind of think about your algorithm at the like, I want to do this sort of, I want to do a Grover search or something like that. And there's just already a library, you know, like the first thing we all do when we learn a new programming language is we go check what's already implemented in the libraries, just rely on those libraries to actually implement some of the lower level stuff for you. So I know that, well again, so my perception of like when Microsoft goes ventures into a new area, when I think of like, let me back up, like IBM research, there are things that IBM research does, and it may never have a commercial application. There's nothing that any normal people go and find, come across in products or services and things out there. Microsoft's approach is usually more of a, you know, a business centric approach to the technology. The idea is that's R and D for commercial application of this technology. So when I read into part of that is that, hey, Microsoft is seems to be further along. Again, I don't know where the other organizations are. Google has done a lot of talking about the space, but I don't see anything out that this was a tangible output by a company that with the commercial focus, is that wrong, that perception? No, I think that's true. And I think kind of the, a lot of companies have been all racing for hardware and Microsoft's, which is also working on hardware, don't get me wrong, but they've taken this being a software company, they've leveraged a lot of their skills that they have around that and their increasing presence in the open source community to build up, you know, even say magically, we had a working quantum computer tomorrow. We wouldn't actually have a good way to interface it with the rest of our like classical computing stack. We wouldn't really know how, like we wouldn't have those intermediary tools to leverage it well. And so that's kind of where the quantum development kit and other things like, so there, it was announced at Ignite last year, the Azure Quantum Service. So that's basically, at a high level, a good way to think about where a quantum computer will fit in our computing stack is similar to GPUs. So it's a specialized hardware accelerator. It's, unfortunately, despite its name, thank you, physicists, it's not, it's not a computer that's going to replace your desktop or something like that. You need classical computers to interface with it. And kind of the same way that we, you know, ship some parts of our jobs out to GPUs, we would, you know, portion out, portion out parts of our work to a quantum device to accelerate particular types of problems. That's actually how we speed everything up. And that idea of like a quantum as a service type model, like, so, so I worked back in the late 90s or 2000s with rational software, they got acquired by, you know, by, by IBM, but a lot of the work that was done working with companies like kids design systems, and building out server farms, so compute farms and that capability was where I started hearing about in the future, and we'll have this, you know, similar capability. So I mean, that, you know, I just assumed that was the direction that would go. I just had no idea where we were along the path. Well, yeah, so it was announced at Ignite that there is a private preview you can sign up for, for the Azure Quantum Service now. I don't, there has to have been no official announced date for when it will go public preview or anything like that. But yeah, it's, it's definitely a really cool thing. You will basically, if you have ever used Azure and you're familiar with requisitioning resources from Azure, you will be able to just requisition quantum hardware and quantum resources in exactly the same model. And so I think that's a really, especially given kind of the hardware constraints for actual quantum devices, which is keeping them at near absolute zero and, you know, all kinds of crazy expensive electronics to support them, you know, having the model where they exist in server farms and other people just kind of interact with them remotely really makes sense for the technology. You're not going to have one in your home. Well, wait a second. I thought it was part of the new Xbox platform that was coming out this fall. I mean, I have had people ask me like, it is called a quantum computer. And so they're like, when am I going to get my quantum laptop or whatever? And it's like, I mean, maybe, maybe a long ways down the line, but I don't see that happening. Yeah. Well, so I mean, so what are some of the applications? What are some of the things people are looking for like to do with this technology today? I mean, I realize kind of where it is, and we still have a long way to go. But what are the some of the things that are be doing even within the academic world? Yeah. And this is actually like one of the things I'll get to the question a sec. But one of the reasons that I think the quantum development kid is really exciting is because it allows you to actually start playing around with what these applications might look like. You actually get to write a program for a quantum computer, like, you know, even me in grad school five years ago, like, I wouldn't, like, what do you mean write a program for quantum computer? You have to like write all the code to write the electrical signals to, you know, do the digital analog yourself. But yeah, so there's kind of two categories of applications that we generally like to think about. There's stuff that we might be able to do with near term sort of hardware. So people like the numbers of qubits that we expect to have in like the next five years, those sorts of applications are usually like chemistry or other sorts of material science questions. So something that I know like Microsoft research has been working on is trying to simulate nitrogen aims, which it's basically like a very common fertilizer that's very expensive for us to chemically make. But plants can do it very efficiently. And we don't understand the process by which plants do it. And so basically, if we can use, it's kind of a funny thing, if you have a quantum system, it happens to be very good at simulating a quantum system. So it seems kind of lame that the initial applications are to just simulate other quantum systems, but it's actually a really useful thing for material science and chemistry and medicine and things like that. So those are kind of some of the applications we're looking at in the near term. Certainly in the long term when we have more resources, like the most common algorithm people talk about is Shor's algorithm, which can actually factor faster than any known classical algorithm, which raises some other questions about security implications and stuff like that. Something else that Microsoft has been kind of working on in parallel is quantum inspired algorithms. So the researchers that are kind of working on exactly this question of how do we define, we know GPUs are really good at highly parallelizable calculations. We don't really know what the definition of a problem that is good for a quantum computer yet. We have examples of things in that box, but we don't know what the shape of that box looks like yet. So the researchers that are working on that have actually turned around and made improvements to classical algorithms just by kind of learning from the insights, thinking about the quantum algorithms. And so there's another group also in the Microsoft quantum group that works on quantum inspired algorithms, where they've actually found improvements to traffic modeling and some other really neat applications, which don't actually require quantum hardware at all to run, but are kind of solutions inspired by thinking about the quantum stuff. I just muted and then unmuted myself. I was going to ask you, so talking about so the development kit that's out there, and obviously there's other kind of heating efforts that are other OEMs than putting their own solutions together, because this is open source. And you said, is Microsoft the only one that took the open source approach in this? No, actually, almost everyone has taken the open source approach, which makes sense to me. But yeah, but yeah, there's not a lot of the differentiation here is likely going to be on your hardware side, not on the software side. And interestingly, almost all of the, including the quantum development kit, which with the language name being Q sharp, it kind of sounds like it is dot net E, and it is, but it also has Python interop. So and almost all the other OEM tools are just Python packages. So basically, if you work in the Python space, you have access to pretty much every option. Okay, I was just wondering, is there, you know, interoperability between the various solutions? Are they all these different groups working together? Are you hanging out with IBMers as well as Googlers and the Microsoft community? I mean, me personally, yes, just because I come from a research background and a lot of pretty much a lot of these industry kind of teams have been brought up by just buying out individual academic labs. But yeah, so I run a community group for Q sharp called Q sharp dot community. And so we have a couple libraries or projects that we help maintain that actually allow you to like cross compile between different OEM solutions. And there are also, I think some startups that are their whole product is basically you write stuff in their platform and they can ship it out to any of the other companies. So there's already startups trying to fill that space as well. So it's an interesting, it's a very interesting space. And especially in the startup scene, there's, you can print money. Yeah, well, but I assume on the king, you mentioned the community side is that is that a virtual or is that local there in the Seattle area that stuff that you're doing or both? Yeah, so I do a lot of kind of the main way I found my personally found my way into tech was by community groups. So things like pie ladies here are ladies. I just really liked that model of kind of collaborative like community, it just that that's the pattern of most MVPs. So that is those that are watching and wondering like how get involved and how to be an MVP. It's like that whatever area that you're in, what technology that you're interested in, it's like that's the path for almost all of us. Yeah, like I went to build two years ago off of a free ticket I got from the cloud developer advocates that they'd given to pie ladies and then the next year I got to speak at build. So I was really, it's a really cool system. And so I've been trying to kind of give back and build up some community in the quantum side because given that this is such a huge new area, we don't really have a lot of community around it. And you might say, well, that's because there's not a lot of people yet. And okay, maybe that's true, but they will be here soon. And so, you know, I want to be intentional about how we develop the community and, you know, using things like the Python community as a model. I just, it matters a lot to me that we actually make this an inclusive and welcoming community. So the Qsharp.community group is just a kind of a community contribution organization on GitHub. So feel free to check that out. We have a blog if anybody has any cool ideas or things they've done with Qsharp and want to post a blog there, have to. I also have started a meetup group here in Seattle called Wicca, Women in Quantum Computing and Applications. I've been sitting on those social media handles for like two years and not think of the right time to use it, but I got it now. That's great. So, and it's been really fun. We've had a first couple meetings. We had one in person before the quarantine started, but we've been going all virtual now, which is really fun because we get a lot of people now that are not in Seattle. And so, yeah, we have basically talks by different people. Right now, we're going through a Quantum 101 series. So just kind of taking different aspects of quantum computing, quantum programming, quantum hardware and having somebody talk about it at like a very 101 sort of level. And we'll get, as we kind of build up, we'll do some more technical deep dives and stuff like that. And hopefully when we can be in person again, hack nights and stuff like that. I'm assuming you've got a site that you're compiling all this, so if somebody wants to go in and catch up. Yeah. Yeah, definitely. Just, I would start by checking out either QSharp.community or Wicca.dev. Both of those have a bunch of links. And I also personally, I'm writing a book about teaching, so learning quantum computing with Python and QSharp. If we're finishing the last chapter now, it should be out soon. But it's in Manning early release right now. And I should have some codes for you if you want to give them out. Yeah. Yeah. That's awesome. Well, definitely, you know, hey, I'm a big, you know, community advocate, anything I do to point people to it and promote, I'm happy to do that as well. Well, my last question for you was that because I know that you're talking about, there's not a lot of people that are involved in this space yet, and it's definitely going to grow and expand. So you have, so I'm middle-aged, so I can say, you know, a lot of kids in university that are coming through. But where would you recommend that they go and kind of get started? What are the typical paths that kind of lead to this area, or whether is there a need? Is there a gap today where you need people from one area or another? Yeah. And that's a great question. You know, I think a lot of people think about what are traditional ways into this field, which are things like physics, computer science, sometimes even chemistry. And those are certainly great options if that's what you're interested in. But honestly, one of the biggest needs right now is people who don't have those backgrounds at all. Well, so I have to talk to my son, who's very smart, you know, I've got a son who's at University of Utah in the Department of Atmospheric Sciences. And we always joke that, you know, Nick wants to be a weatherman, this stuff. He's like, no, he's into, and the physics, he's actually taking some other statistics. He's got a minoring in computer science. And so I've actually pointed him towards like, go learn, you know, Python, because a lot of the other, the stats based stuff and things that he wants to do the analytical side, like it's naturally, it's moving that direction. But that seems like, again, another great path if he has an interest more on the, the math and not, not that atmospheric sciences is not hard science. That's not what I want to say. He's a much smarter human being that I am. But he, but anyway, so but, but that's an example of not probably not the traditional path into computing, but and I think that's one of the great strengths now that we have this kind of software stack that's going into that's all open sources, like people, like if you have good working and open source skills, like your help is needed. If you're good at like, I've actually been talking to a lot of people who do front end web design for visualizations, just because, you know, quantum is kind of hard to understand. I don't think it's as hard as people claim it is. The presentation layer of that, you know, whatever that is, like, what our user interface is going to look like for this, like, really, if anyone is interested in just helping kind of like, basically the rest of the stack now has to come in, like we have the hardware is almost there. You know, people who I've done a lot of work in the lab and kind of like the interoperability layer of how do you get from scientific instruments that are actually emitting the control pulses and things like that to your dot net, you know, to your actual C sharp code, like that stack, anyone who's interested there, like, you know, I think basically there's a place for almost anyone here. Yeah. And it's a really open field, like they're, I mean, there aren't as many people, you know, because people have this thought that they have to either understand all the physics or understand the quantum part to be able to contribute. I mean, that's not true. There were basically just down to classical engineering problems that we definitely know how to solve. But we just need the help to do so because spaces, businesses are not generally the best programmers. So please let's get rid of this legacy code. There was a just a conversation this past week about how there's suddenly a hiring a boon of cobalt programmers. And it's like, almost 30 years ago, I was working for a place and they tried to convince me to become a cobalt programmer. I shunned it then to work on Y2K stuff. And of course, financially, I'd be doing really well had I gone into a cobalt. But, you know, I might also have gone insane. But, but anyway, I mean, it's I really appreciate the overview of this stuff and the opportunities out there. People want to find out more about you, follow you get in touch with you. What are the best ways to reach you? I'm on Twitter a lot. So my handle is crazy. The number four PI 314. I did a lot of PI memorization contests in high school kind of stuck. Do you have another profile that goes to full 240 characters of PI? No, I don't. I tried to mention you. They can't say anything because of your name. That would be so mean. Yeah, so I'm I'm crazy for PI 314 on almost on GitHub on Twitter. And my personal website is sckaiser.dev. So yeah, you can find all the rest of the contact info there. And but yeah, please feel to feel free to tweet at me, LinkedIn me, whatever, ask ask your quantum questions. And yeah, I'm always excited to talk about that stuff. And that is the Dr. Sarah Kaiser. And so so just say that the doctors open, you know, the office hours doctors and you know, I should do that. Do that as like office hours, the doctor's office is open. But really appreciate your time today. Is it great to meet you virtually here and stay safe and enjoy the beautiful Seattle area when you can when you can get outside? Definitely. Thanks for speaking with me, Christian. Talk to you soon. Bye. Bye.