 Good morning. I'm Shaheen Parks. Welcome to What's Next, a seminar series presented by IBM Research in which we spend time with some of our top scientists and researchers learning about the exciting work that they're doing. Today I'll be joined by Dr. Kayla Lee who runs Academic Alliances with IBM Quantum. If you've been following along with our last few sessions, you'll know we've spent a lot of time delving into topics related to artificial intelligence. Today we'll be switching gears a bit to dig into quantum computing. But rather than focusing on the what or the how of quantum, today we'll be talking a little bit more about the who. Kayla will tell us a bit about quantum computing to give us some context and help us understand why representation in this field is important at all. So then share with us some sobering statistics about diversity among doctoral recipients and talk to us about how these issues could be addressed. So then give us some perspective on the program IBM has set up with historically black colleges and universities and how it's structured to start addressing these systemic issues while quantum is still in these early stages. After Kayla's talk, we'll be joined by Dr. Makayla Amu, assistant professor at Howard University and director of the IBM HBCU Quantum Center for a discussion. If you'd like to join into our conversation, please feel free to drop your comments and questions into the chat and we'll incorporate them into our talk. With that I'll hand over to strategic academic partnerships at IBM Quantum. I'm really excited to be with you all today to talk about how we're building an equitable quantum future with a partnership with historically black colleges and universities or HBCUs. Quantum computing is a new model of computation that leverages properties of quantum mechanics to compute information differently. Because we're at this critical point where the technology is new, we're at an extremely interesting intersection where we can start being more intentional about who's part of this technology. That includes who's building it, who's asking the questions about what problems we'll solve and identifying potential applications. Quantum computing has a unique potential to solve problems that we can't solve today. Classical computers are really good at solving a certain amount of problems. Think about something like multiplication. There are some problems though that as they get bigger with scale they become more difficult to solve. So think about something like factoring. This is a problem with as the size as it grows it has the potential to be a really great problem for quantum computers to solve and that's the opportunity here. Solving problems that we can't solve today on classical computers. And as I mentioned before because we're at this early point there's a unique opportunity to be very intentional about who's part of that journey. When you think about quantum computing there's a traditional computing staff on what different technologies, tools and skills are required to ensure that we're following the quantum journey. At IBM we're one of the few companies that's a full quantum computing staff. So if I start at the bottom here you have hardware and systems. These are the actual quantum computers that you're building that are needed to run quantum circuits, run pull schedules, actually start doing things that we can't do on classical computers. Think about people like engineers and hardware physicists that are down building our systems. On top of that you have libraries. So think about collections of circuits, templates and pull schedules that are actually required to start interacting with the quantum computers. These are people like lower level developers or control electronics. On top of that you have your algorithms and applications. Now that we have these quantum circuits how do we actually ensure that we're building algorithms and hybrid routines that can solve real-world problems? People that are focused on this stack are interested in domain applications and they're really experts in their own fields or industries. And then on top of that we have things like tools and services. So these are the things that go throughout the stack to ensure that there's functionality and future computing architecture and how we're actually using these tools. It's really important that at each layer in this stack we have people that represent a diverse background interest to ensure that the quantum computing stack that we build for tomorrow is more reflective of that world. At IBM we've taken a really important stance to ensure that the quantum ecosystem and community that we're building looks a little bit more like the world that we live in. So to do this we have three main ways. The first is open access. So IBM is one of the only companies that offers real quantum computers on the cloud for public use. So if you wanted to you could start programming a quantum computer today. The second is open source technology. So we have our own software development kit called Kiskit where you can use Python to program real quantum computers and once again these frameworks are available to everyone and the third is a community. So we're investing in a global and diverse community of students, researchers, educators, and developers to ensure that this quantum technology that we're building is more inclusive. But we know that access alone isn't enough to ensure that these niche technology fields look slightly different and so because of that we're exploring new opportunities programs in partnership to ensure that the world we're building looks a little bit different. So one group in particular that I want to call out are historically black colleges or universities. So here on my chart I have a few things. At the bottom you can see the size of institutions. On the y-axis you have the number of black or african-americans that have received doctor degrees where these were their original institutions. So it's known that HBCUs are top contributor of people that go on to receive their doctorate degrees and so it's really interesting here is that you can actually see that they're at an outsized rate producing a high number of black students that go on to receive their doctorate degrees. So in fact the schools in purple which are non-HBCUs although they're very large in size the number of students that they contribute to that go on to get their PhDs is much lower. At the top of the chart you see two universities that are really outpacing in the production of black PhD students and at Spellman College which is a small all-women school in Atlanta, Georgia and Howard University which is located in Washington, DC. Because of this we know that HBCUs represent a really unique group and talent pool to start partnering with more as we start thinking about the skills needed to grow and build a lot of workforce. Now when you start to ask the question why do the numbers look the way they do the American Institute of Physics produced a report over the past few years that highlighted five main factors as to why underrepresented students especially black students in STEM aren't like the numbers of their counterparts. So the first two reasons are belonging and physics identity so we know that fostering a sense of belonging is extremely critical for success and how African-American students perceive themselves and how they're perceived by others as future scientists is extremely important in their success so that includes starting in the field but also staying in the field. The second is academic and personal support so these include the things that are really necessary for students to be successful that includes academic support tutoring but also finances and socioeconomic status. The third is just leadership and structures so the environments that students are in the policies the structures really need to be redefined to ensure that they're creating an environment that's maximized for student success. So as we started to build this partnership with HBCUs we thought about two things the first was that chart and the fact that HBCUs contribute at a high number that's a black students in STEM and the second were these five factors on why the numbers haven't changed and with that we formed a program that really focused on three main pillars the first is building community and fostering a sense of the belonging. HBCUs are already really great at ensuring that students have culture and feel like they belong in a community so we want to continue to to leverage that as we're working with students and faculty. The second is support so how can we provide graduate students and undergraduate students with the resources the training tools that they need to ensure that they're successful in the field and the final is connect so how do we build bridges to the quantum research experts in the community and our HBCU faculty and students to ensure that they're engaged in active participants in the quantum future that we're building. So with all of this we came to the IBM HBCU Quantum Center which brings together a network of students researchers and faculty at HBCUs to build research and education capabilities in quantum computing. Within the program IBM is providing access to our quantum computers on the cloud educational support for learning quantum computation and faculty and student support for quantum research. What's been exciting about this does not only have we seen great excitement within IBM but within the broader quantum community and the HBCU community as they're all starting to ask the question like what do we need to do what skills do we need to develop to be active and intentional about how the quantum future is built. Within the center we now have 23 schools which you can see dotted along the east and southern region. They're all arranged in different regions which all have their own research focus areas. For us we hope that as the ecosystem continues to build and develop interactions within the center and their regions will continue to grow but also interactions within the broader quantum community. So something that's really unique about HBCUs are where they're located and if you were to put this map on top of some of the other quantum computing centers in the world they're in other places so it's really important that we start to be intentional about building some of those relationships and connections. Within the center we have several programs focused around research, faculty development, and student engagement for the purpose of this talk I'll call out a few of my favorites. So the first of the quantum coalition undergraduate research follow program this program brings together 30 undergraduate students. They're each paired with faculty researchers at the HBCUs and then assigned a research project. In this project they're exposed to quantum computers, they learn a little bit of the theory, they're writing code on the technology, and then after that they're encouraged to apply to conferences, summer quantum programs, and then hopefully the goal is that they're then placed in postgraduate institutions to continue their quantum research. The second is our quantum information science invited seminar series. So in this we bring together experts from the quantum community and our faculty and researchers at HBCUs to create a forum for them to talk about research and programs that they're all working in. It's been a really great way for faculty to know things that are happening within the community but also for the community to know about the research that our faculty is taking part in. Now when it comes to actually measuring success of this program we think about impact on four dimensions and a bit of a step-wise function. So the first is student engagement. How do we just get students excited and engaged about quantum computing? And once they're excited they know they have a place they can go to learn more. The second is talent development. So what steps do we need to take to train students so that it's impactful? The third is workforce development. So now that we've introduced students to this technology how are career trajectories actually impacted by these experiences? And the final thing is research capacity. So how do we strengthen research efforts to ensure that we're building programs that don't just last for the next few months or years but really as the quantum market continues to mature and develop? We launched in September 2020 and since then we've had a few really exciting things that I want to share with you all today. The first is that North Carolina AT was awarded almost a million dollars from the NSF in partnership with a program called Q-Steam that's actually build undergraduate curriculum. The goal here is to build modular undergraduate curriculum really designed for lower resource institutions with the hope that we can start building our quantum ready workforce. The second is Norfolk State was recently awarded an NSF grant that's focused on quantum material science. So this is another really cool example of how faculty have been working with the center but also kind of defining their own research programs in a way that's aligned with the quantum goals. And finally in partnership with SPIE we recently launched the IBM SPIE HPC Faculty Accelerator Award. In this award it's really geared at how do we start expanding not just quantum computing but quantum optics and photonics for faculty members at the school. We're really excited that in March we'll be announcing our second round at this award. So looking forward we're already really proud of the success that we've done. We've built a community of over 500 students, faculty and researchers. We've had few publications, lots of conferences and we're really excited to start building best practices and lessons for how we think the IBM HPCU Quantum Center can provide future guidance, advice on what it looks like to bring quantum computing to not just HPCUs but other minority-serving institutions, community college and in general just lower resource institutions. Thank you. Kayla thanks so much for that thoughtful overview. As I mentioned at the beginning we'll now be joined by Dr. Makayla Amu, assistant professor at Howard University and also the director of the IBM HPCU Quantum Center. Dr. Amu thanks so much for joining us today. Could you tell us a little bit about your role? So first of all thank you for inviting me. I'm the director of the center. Primarily my job is to make sure that the faculty and all participants, the undergraduates and graduate students have access to all of the resources that the IBM Quantum Cloud can offer. We also arrange training and career development workshops for the faculty and also for the graduate students and we make sure that the undergraduates have a set program so that we know that once they've been through the program as an IBM HPCU Quantum Center fellow that they all have a set skill set and we challenge them to apply the skills that we teach them to the research that they're working with their advisors. So I basically facilitate that. Well that sounds like a really important role. Could you tell us a little bit more about any specific work either that the faculty are doing or that the students are doing in this field? So I'll talk about my research for a little bit. So you know I'm primarily a hardware engineer and I dived into the quantum world because AMO scientists kept coming to me and saying hey we need a really fast control system for our experiments. Can you design one for us? And that kind of evolved into convergence research and one of the primary problems that we have is that we have to compute a lot of data across frequency and different time scales and different types of equipment, different types of lasers and we have to form all into one coherent control system. And everybody's really interested in machine learning but one of the things is machine learning algorithms take a great deal of computational time and often don't converge to an optimal solution. So my research that I actually participate with in the center is the development of quantum testbeds for machine learning algorithms and the goal is so we can have machine learning algorithms that one can deal with non-deterministic type of problems real well problems where chance and no factors come into play and of course the second goal is the speed of computation so we can give the AMO scientists real-time control systems. But in the center we have a very diverse set of research so we go from quantum biology all the way to electromechanics and we have about six or seven different faculty at different institutions working on very diverse problems. In fact North Carolina ANT is actually working on STEM education particularly for quantum workforce. So it sounds like rather than necessarily just drawing people who have an interest in quantum computing in and of itself you're able to assemble people who are interested in a wide variety of problems and challenges and apply quantum computing as a tool to help them further their knowledge in these areas. Is that fair to say? That is fair to say because most of the problems in the quantum world right now can't simply be solved by quantum computing. They require convergence so we need mechanical engineers, electrical engineers, physicists, statisticians. We also need like sociologists and psychologists because one of the really interesting things is how do students actually form an identity as a quantum engineer? How does a faculty form an identity as a quantum engineer? What sort of training and best practices helps to form a sustainable program especially under research institutions? So we tend to take a convergence approach where we kind of partner people together who have similar interests and they might be in different fields but the problem solution is found at the intersection of those fields. It sounds like that really it makes a lot of sense and Kaila I was wondering if you feel like that's really where the program sort of steps in and starts to fill that need. Absolutely so in general a lot of HBCs might not have been doing quantum information science research for the past 40 years like an IBM and so being able to take fields that have adjacent interests or even doing supporting technology is really important as we start asking what do we need to do to build the workforce and so I actually think a lot of the schools we're working with are good examples of I was thinking about traditional material science how might this apply to quantum materials and so that's what I'm really excited about doing more of like those fields that are close and getting them more into quantum. Michael would you agree that that's sort of the the niche that this partnership is really helping foster? Absolutely because we have a lot of centers of excellence and really strong expertise at HBCs, MSIs, you know minority seven institutions in general but there's a resource gap right? So somebody might be really strong in mechanical engineering and auto mechanics but they don't really have the resources to conduct an experiment in the quantum realm and so by putting various fields together one we form a really strong network and partnerships where there's collaborations between different types of institution but we also encourage you know our research is to think out of the box and kind of come together to find that solution that's at the intersection. That's fantastic. So I know the program is relatively new and so you know I think it sounds like you're seeing some early measures of success and I'd love to hear more about you know what those are and how they're playing out but I'd also be interested in both of your perspectives on kind of a long-term view for the program. Say we look out 10 years from now how will we know that the program is achieving the goals that we hope to. Maybe I'll start with some early wins. One of the really cool things about bringing a really big corporate partner like IBM with HBCUs together is we have a very different reach. So I think about HBCUs as being on the ground they're great at working with different types of students like I said along that map there are those different geographical regions that they represent and IBM has like the voice so two years ago when we first launched we got this really excited email from a student that was like hey I heard about this like how do I get started. Since then he's been an internet IBM like he's still continuing his quantum research and so just knowing that from some of our marketing and our different efforts we've been able to introduce people to quantum bring them into IBM to work. To me as an example of a really exciting year term win and I would like to do more of that right like ensuring that once a student says oh I'm interested in quantum computing that they know they have IBM in the center to go to a faculty members to go to and honestly start thinking that HBCUs might be a great place to start their quantum career. To me that's a great like near-term one. Long term I'm definitely interested in really changing what the workforce looks like and so it starts small you start to see more students and faculty represented at conferences you see it in publication records but over time I think it's how many quantum information science quantum computing specific faculty are teaching at these institutions. How are programs being built at these institutions what schools are really theaters into some of the other like PhD masters and industry workforce so that's what I'm thinking about long term. What about you Mikayla? So we've seen some really good successes so in the first year of the program I started a very small undergraduate research team and of that five member team two of them actually stayed on for graduate school to continue the the research that we were doing. So Robert started last fall so he's a first year PhD student and Erin returns this fall to the PhD program. As part of the funding another electrical engineering student has been working over in physics with one of our faculty members Sigata Choudhury and she's so excited about the research that she's also going to join the graduate program in August so I mean right there within like a year of the program we've already got three undergraduates who normally would never have considered like a quantum research sort of PhD who are now well and truly committed to quantum you know engineering and using that for the for the dissertation topic. We also see other things for instance you know Sigata and I collaborated on a grant with northeastern that was a great collaboration we went to grant from the from the DOD these are all short-term successes that have happened in like the first 18 months of the program. We have students from universities such as Coppin State Morgan State and NCAT who are actually working with advisors at different schools so we're also starting to form networks across different schools and of course now this year we're starting to see more conference publications and our faculty are really going out there and making the names now so I think in the first 18 months of the program we've had quite a few successes and it's exciting. That's really inspiring here so we have a question from one of our audience members about the relationship between quantum computing and IBM power systems is that something that you can comment on? Sure so IBM power systems one of our big brands at IBM right now I think of them as kind of separate so quantum computers are absolutely in their developmental state we're focused on building processors building the systems and the tools that we need down the line we are thinking about things like how might they integrate with existing architectures but for now the focus is build quantum computers make them accessible specifically on the IBM cloud and then I think we can talk a little bit later about how that integrates with power z and some of our other more computing systems. All in the works yeah fantastic you know we are coming to the end of our time but I want to open this up for kind of a big picture question you know we've talked a lot about all these efforts and kind of allocating resources to where they can be most effective but really the I want to turn it back to just just ask both of you why is this so hard this is a known problem it's not a new problem you know what why why are we still struggling so much so one of the things that I think about a lot is how did i get involved in science uh I was super lucky I had a dad that worked at IBM uh and a mom that was a computer scientist and that really jump started my career and my interest I think for a lot of other people it's willing to ask like how do you find out about the career that you do uh if it's something like quantum computing which is there's a very small community you need to have a certain level of backgrounds even understand how to engage right like we're talking about a lot of barriers to entry and that's early on when I'm just thinking about a career but that's not once I actually get in the field and then like I'm discouraged from continuing it look maybe my gender maybe my identity and so there are a lot of different things that have to move at the same time so that we can start seeing an impact uh and to be honest I think it's hard to know where to start and so what I hope is that the center starts to introduce a few examples of like what that could look like maybe it's a really cool campaign on youtube where we're talking about the center uh maybe it's a paper or conference where we're reaching different people but I do think we have to ask the question like how do we engage uh in excite different audiences and I don't think it's it's super easy especially when you think about what the field looks like today uh compared to what Booth wanted to look like tomorrow I mean absolutely I couldn't agree more Michela do you want to comment um so I'll just piggyback on what um Kayla said so as we said before there are a lot of expertise at HBCUs and minority certain institutions unfortunately they are resource struck right so you know let's say you have a student they're really interested in AMO there are very few HBCUs that can you know invest a million or two million dollars for a start of luck cost is a huge barrier to entry in certain parts of you know quantum computing which is why it's so great that IBM you know have this huge quantum cloud um but one of the things I would like to see is for industry to be very intentional in their engagements with MSIs and start thinking about things like can we build a lab we have center of expertise here we have the faculty of expertise the students of expertise you know can we can we build a lab right can we give more money that can be freely used for faculty start-up you know another thing is that you know faculty at minority certain institutions are overworked right there's few resources they have a high teaching load and somehow they have to teach with excellence and they also have to conduct research train undergrad and train graduate students right and so another thing that I'd like to see from both government and industry is as I say some very intentional partnerships where they actually look at you know maybe funding a you know a faculty bio like 50 percent bio right so that the faculty have money to hire somebody else so that they can concentrate on the research write papers train undergraduates and then the other real important thing I think is question of engineering identity how do undergraduates and graduate students build that engineering identity as a quantum scientist right where they feel at home in the existing kind of field with existing researchers when they go to primarily white institutions right and we have to look at best practices and methodology to help the undergraduates and the graduate students kind of build that core identity and confidence so that when they go to conferences or when they go into the workforce you know they feel confident they feel like experts they feel like they belong in the field because if you feel like you don't be long and you're always on outside looking in it's kind of very difficult to to to build a workforce so I think that's most important I mean I couldn't agree more with all of what you've both just said so thank you so much and thanks for participating with us today and this whole conversation it's been so informative and interesting and I hope that it's been illuminating for a lot of members of our audience as well and thank you audience members for joining us today if you would like to learn more about the programs we talked about about quantum computing in general there's some links on the youtube page and I also wanted to mention if you were paying close attention to Kayla's slides you may have noticed a researcher featured in the lab in one of her last slides that's Dr. Micah Tequita who will be featured on our next what's next session talking about quantum error correction so I hope that you'll join us then