To the Unitary Fund community,

Hope that you all are having a welcome start to 2022. In this quarterly newsletter we’ll take a look back at some highlights from the last quarter of last year.

In addition to new grants and updates to mitiq, we’re proud to have enabled, together with QOSF, the 2021 edition of the Wittek Prize. Look out to hear about the winner soon!

Also be on the lookout for our 2021 Annual Report, which will summarize updates from our programs and community from the whole of last year.

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

  • Alwoina Yap and Frances Poblete have joined the Unitary Fund team to help us improve and scale our marketing and communications reach.

  • About Mitiq:

    • We released version 0.11.1 of Mitiq, adding PennyLane support

    • The Mitiq integration with PennyLane is featured on the PennyLane blog!

    • Andrea Mari gave a recorded Qiskit Seminar on Mitiq.

  • Our paper on extending probabilistic error cancellation got published in Phys. Rev. A. (arXiv:2108.02237).

  • We hosted two Quantum Software Talks (check out the videos, the talks are great!):

    • Pedro Riveiro spoke about QRAND, a library for quantum

    • The PyGSTi team spoke about this Python tool for noise characterization

  • We attended Q2B with a booth and a talk by Sarah Kaiser. Thanks to our ambassador Misty Wahl who also volunteered to attend and represent Unitary Fund!

  • Sarah Kaiser is a 2021 Python Software Foundation Fellow.

• New Grants

  • To Lingling Lao, to develop 2QAN, a compiler that optimizes quantum circuits for 2-local qubit Hamiltonian simulation problems. [arXiv]

  • To Ben Braham, to develop a framework to define and run variational quantum algorithms in QuTiP, leveraging quantum optimal control to parametrize control pulses.

  • To Hoang Van Do, Elie Gouzien, and Saesun Kim to develop a Heisenberg-picture simulator and universal gate set for high dimensional systems.

  • To Abuzer Yakaryilmaz and the QWorld team to organize QCourse511, a graduate-level online course on quantum computing and programming.

  • To George Watkins, Alex Nguyen, Varun Seshadri, and Keelan Watkins to further develop a lattice-surgery-based quantum error correction compiler.

• News from UF Projects

  • QuTiP held its first community call, with Google Summer of Code projects. Videos can be found here.

  • PennyLane community calls are now being hosted weekly on our Discord.

  • The KnowYourLimits project, OSS for the assessment of noisy, limited connectivity quantum devices for optimization, by Daniel Stranca is out with docs.

• Coming up in 2022

  • QuTiP community meeting: 26th of January 2022. 2pm-3pm CET, discord.unitary.fund

  • QHack 2022 is coming February 14-22 2022! Applications are open.

  • In 2022, we are resuming the Quantum Software Meetups with the folks from QOSF, on Gather Town.

Best wishes to all of you,

Will and the Unitary Fund Team