Unitary Fund Q1 2021 Update: New grants and a Mitiq release driven by the community

To the Unitary Fund community,

It's been an amazing year at Unitary Fund so far: we've grown our microgrant program, launched a new streaming talk series, and opened up a Discord server for the community.

We continue to work hard to support the development of a vibrant, open quantum technology ecosystem. Thanks to all of you who have joined us in this mission.

• New from Unitary Fund

• We are running UnitaryHack, our first quantum open source hackathon with SWAG and BOUNTIES, on May 14-30th!
• Welcome Olivia! Our newest team member, Olivia has joined as our new Administration to help us grow and optimize Unitary Fund 's programs.
• Help wanted: We are hiring for technical staff positions. We’re not only interested in quantum experienced applicants, but also diverse applicants with full stack web experience.
• If you missed it, read our 2020 Annual Report here.
• About Mitiq: 
• We continue to develop in the open, and now at its 0.7.0 release on PyPI. You can join our community call on Fridays at 2:30pm ET on Discord ( discord.unitary.fund)
• Mitiq v.0.7.0 contains several contributions from the community! Thanks to @yhindy for adding a method to parametrically scale noise in circuit, to @elmahmoud for adding a factory for zero noise extrapolation, to @aaron-robertson and @pchung39 for adding Qiskit executors with depolarizing noise to the utils, to @purva-thakre for several fixes and improvements. Thanks also to @BobinMathew and @marwahaha for typo corrections.
• We added probabilistic error correction (PEC) to the quantum error mitigation techniques. 
• Everyone can now contribute examples to the documentation directly with Jupyter Notebooks thanks to a new MystNB-based infrastructure.
• We had more guests on Quantum Software Talks Series on Twitch, with recordings uploaded to Youtube. 
• We hosted Intro to QuTiP: A Quantum Toolbox in Python by Shahnawaz Ahmed and Intro to QuNetSim: A Software Framework for Quantum Networks by Stephen DiAdamo.
• We hosted 3 research talks on Discord:
• “Exponential Error Suppression for Near-Term Quantum Devices”, by Bálint Koczor.
• Chen Wang, “Protecting a bosonic qubit with autonomous quantum error correction”, by Chen Wang.
• AMA on gate tomography and randomized benchmarking, by Cassandra Granade.
• Sarah from the Unitary Fund team gave an interview on quantum computing 
• Andrea and Ryan spoke on our error-mitigating research at the APS March Meeting

• 7 New Grants

• To Goutam Tamvada and Douglas Stebila to develop VeriFrodo, an open-source package implementing a lattice-based quantum-resistant cryptographic algorithms in Jasmin within the Open Quantum Safe project.
• To Owen Lockwood to develop a software package using classical deep reinforcement learning to improve quantum optimization, both for quantum simulations and hardware integration.
• To Daniel Stilck França to develop a software package that will help benchmark the limitations of noisy quantum devices for solving optimization problems. [arXiv] [ QIP talk on the technique].
• To Rhea Parekh and Stephen DiAdamo to further develop Interlin-q, a distributed quantum-enabled simulator integrated with QuNetSim.
• To Dariusz Lasecki to build an open-source Python library that delivers easy-to-use high-quality pre-trained machine learning models to predict good QAOA starting parameters for selected classes of problems.
• To Oscar Higgot, to continue developing and maintaining PyMatching, a Python package for decoding quantum error correcting codes with minimum-weight perfect matching (MWPM).
• To Nicola Mosco, to develop HomodyneCT, a software package for medical diagnostics that uses a quantum-tomography-inspired technique for state reconstruction in order to reduce the radiation dose patients receive.
  
  

• News from UF Projects

• A new QuTiP related job posting: the position to join the QuTiP dev team can be fully remote for 2022!
• QuTiP is also participating in Google Summer of Code 2021! Deadline for student applications is in one week.
• https://quantumflytrap.com/ is growing with a new CNOT game and their first intern. They also posted a new blog post demoing interactive visualizations for qubits.
• QRand has released v0.2.0 
• QWorld continues to expand globally and now has chapters in 14 countries!
• PyZX is used in new papers on the WolframPhysics project on foundations and in quantum machine learning
• Qubit x Qubit hosted a diversity in quantum computing conference

• Quantum Community Updates


• QHack was held from February 17th, 2021.
• QOSF completed the second cohort of their mentorship program. Several Unitary Fund projects were involved.
• Qiskit has launched a mentorship program
• Unitary Fund advisor Michal Stechly started a new podcast "Noisy Intermediate-Scale Podcast".
• IBM Quantum has released more open source software: qiskit metal for designing superconducting quantum hardware; active reset; and their new software roadmap.
• QC40 will be held in May to celebrate 40 years of QC Research

Best wishes to all of you,

Will and the Unitary Fund Team