 Hi, my name is Dr. Olivia Laines and I am the team lead of Education and Kisket Community in North America at IBM Quantum. I want to introduce Dr. Kayla Lee. The Academic Alliance Lead for IBM Quantum will be discussing the IBM HBCU Quantum Center with Dr. Makayla Amu from Howard University. In September 2020, we launched the IBM HBCU Quantum Center, which brings together a network of 23 historically black colleges or universities, or HBCUs. Since its launch, the IBM HBCU Quantum Center has over doubled our number of registered users on IBM Quantum systems, built a community of over 400 students, faculty, and researchers, and even published a few papers. I'm here today with Dr. Makayla Amu, assistant professor at Howard University in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Hi, Makayla. Hi, Kayla. How are you? I'm great. Nice to see you. Can you tell us a bit more about your research interests and how you've introduced those in coursework? A HBCU is actually difficult for students to get involved in quantum research, you know, because of barriers to entry for like AMO experiments or lack of resources. And so I'm actually a hardware engineer, a computer engineer, and I design applications specific processes. So basically, I speed up computations. And then people started to ask me, you know, I have this quantum system. When you do quantum control readout systems, you know, I can't read these readouts fast enough. Can we do some machine learning? And so that's how I got involved in quantum. And that's how I involve my students. So you mentioned that there are a lot of barriers to entry, specifically with HBCU students in undergraduate research. Can you say a bit more about why it's important that we create these research opportunities for students now, especially in a new field like quantum? A lot of quantum experiments take place in these very costly research labs, right? So the average stuff for an AMO and atomic molecular optical experimental lab is probably about half a million to a million. The equipment that are used in these labs are kind of custom built. You can't go to a store and buy it. The professors and the students kind of put it together themselves. And so there's this built-in knowledge at PWL primary and white institutions where they've spent years and years and years developing these highly, you know, specific research labs and this customized equipment. And HBCUs, because of lack of funding, because of lack of resources, there just isn't that sort of equipment or that sort of lab experience. And so it's really important that we enable minority underrepresented students the opportunity to actually go and perform research in these labs, or we give them a cloud experience so that they don't need to actually go to these labs to learn how to perform quantum experiments. They can do them right there and then at school using the laptops or the desktops. And so one of the great things that the IBM Center has brought to them are these cloud computing options where the students can literally log into the IBM cloud and use the IBM resources to build up this knowledge that they haven't been able to get from the home institution. So let's just hop forward a few years. What do you see as being some really great wins of the program, but also the experiences that you're bringing to students? First of all, we're introducing the students, right, to different areas so that they can find their own place, right, their own path. But then the other thing is there are resources, there are tutorials, there are labs, there are simulation circuits, so we're enabling them to get the research skills that they need if they want to go on to say graduate school or they want to go and work in an R&D lab. So one of the things that we do is we fund the researchers, we fund the professors and we also fund the students. So it's like a full package. And so the students get trained, they get really enthusiastic because many studies have shown that an undergraduate hands-on undergraduate research experience is one of the greatest ways to build self-efficacy, which is like a feeling of belonging, right? They feel like quantum scientists, right? And they get the research skills and they get really excited about what they're doing and so then they're going to go ahead, they're going to apply to graduate school or they're going to go work in research labs, right, or maybe come work for IBM and things like that. I mean, there's many different levels of the quantum workforce and we have to ensure that our students can fully participate in the quantum workforce because this is going to be the science of the 21st century. It's going to drive everything. Thank you so much, Mikayla, for joining us and talking a bit about how you've introduced research within the IBM HBCU Quantum Center. Looking forward, we're really excited to continue introducing students to quantum computing and also getting them excited for the future and what the IBM HBCU Quantum Center has to hold. Thanks and back to you, Olivia. Dr. Lee, Dr. Amu, thank you so much for that discussion and for the really important work that you're doing with this initiative. Now, I want to introduce Professor Steve Gervin, Eugene Higgins, Professor of Physics at Yale University, who will be sharing some thoughts and experiences that he's had using Kiskit in the classroom. Thanks, Olivia. In the classroom, I teach the basic concepts behind quantum information science. It's such a new field that there really doesn't exist a well-established textbook. And the Kiskit textbook, developed online by the Kiskit community, is growing into that role. It provides valuable supplementary information and background information and reading opportunities for the students, which complements the material that I cover in class and the way I describe things. It's very important for students to be able to see things from different points of view from a textbook and from the professor's lectures. The quantum workforce right now is still quite small. The demand is outstripping supply. And as the field develops, we'll need more and more people who are engineers or who are perhaps master's students rather than PhDs and even undergraduates who are contributing to the development of these new technologies. IBM has made tremendous investments in bringing quantum systems to the cloud, to the online world. Young people will have a chance to play with the hardware, try out things, hack around, figure out shortcuts, figure out ways to make it work better. And I think this is going to have a tremendous impact on the development of the field, both because progress will be made in the field, but also because so many people from such a wide range of backgrounds will now have access to get into the field. We're at the very beginning of an exciting new revolution in information processing using quantum technology. We're in what people call the NISC era, noisy intermediate scale quantum era. Our components, our quantum components are not nearly as reliable and close to perfect as the ones in your traditional computers. But we're working hard to build those in a better way to learn how to solve really the grand challenge in the field, which is quantum error correction, so that we can run quantum algorithms for longer and longer times and solve more and more complex problems and gain greater and greater quantum advantage over traditional forms of computation. I'm extremely excited about this challenge and impressed with the remarkable rate of progress in the field. Back to you, Olivia. Thank you so much, Professor Gervin. Figuring out how to best use Kiskit in the classroom and for courseware has always been one of our top priorities. Now I want to talk about how we're also going to be using IBM Quantum hardware and Kiskit, not just for educational purposes, but for research as well. Last year, IBM Quantum launched the Open Science Prize, a first-of-its-kind competition challenging members of our community to help solve important outstanding research problems in the field of quantum information. This contest promised a $50,000 award for the teams that presented the best open-source solutions to these problems. The first of the prize's challenges asked participants to decrease the error rate of the swap gate by 50%. The second challenge had participants trying to improve the fidelity of a seven-qubit graph state also by 50%. IBM Quantum researchers selected these challenges due to their solutions potential to make a tremendous impact on the field. We also wanted to encourage members of the Kiskit community to push their understanding of Kiskit as not just a valuable learning tool, but also as a window into doing cutting-edge research. In fact, some of our winners completed the challenge with little to no prior experience using Kiskit. For example, listen to this quote from challenge participant Yufeng Yi. I started this challenge with little to no experience with the Kiskit platform. It took me many hours just to run the example code successfully. But as part of trying to solve the graph state challenge, I slowly became proficient with all the functionalities of Kiskit. I also spent a lot of time diving into related papers by IBM Quantum researchers, which turned out to be excellent resources that taught me a lot about the state-of-the-art quantum error mitigation techniques. Now, I'm excited to announce that at the end of November, we'll be kicking off the Open Science Prize for 2021. This challenge will focus on an entirely different area of quantum research, quantum simulation. Quantum simulation was an idea that was actually first suggested by Richard Feynman in the 80s and has become a prominent area of research over the past few years and deals with simulating important real-world models with applications in chemistry, fundamental physics, and beyond. Actually executing a quantum simulation on a current quantum computer, however, can be difficult and error-prone. The quantum system we will explore this year is a spin-1-half model, where each qubit in the quantum processor represents a quantum spin-1-half particle in a one-dimensional chain. Quantum spin models have some amazing properties and uses. Computationally speaking, certain optimization problems can be mapped to spin models, theoretically giving quantum computers a computational advantage over classical computers. Furthermore, spin models can be used to probe the physics behind a variety of quantum behaviors, such as large entangled states, quantum phases of matter, and quantum many-body effects. However, these problems can also be difficult to simulate, which is why we are asking our community to help us. This year, we're hoping to encourage even wider participation among our community members of all different educational levels and backgrounds. So next month, along with our competition Jupiter Notebook, we will be publishing tutorials and supplementary materials that can hopefully bring everyone up to speed on the tools surrounding this experiment. We hope that you'll help us spread the word or even participate yourself, so that, together, we can push the limits of quantum computation. Thank you so much for your attention and enjoy the rest of the summit.