Unitary Fund Q1 2022 Update: New projects, advisors and supporters!

6 April, 2022
Will Zeng

To the Unitary Fund community,

We’re excited to share our Q1 2022 quarterly update and highlight some of what UF’s been involved with so far this year.

We continue to award new grants, update Mitiq, and add ambassadors, advisors, technical staff and even new members to our program! For more detailed information, have a read at our key highlights below.

As the year progresses, we remain committed to growing our support towards the quantum open source ecosystem. Thank you all for your continued support and being a part of our journey. Make sure to follow our Discord, Twitter,LinkedIn, and our Community Calendar.

Upcoming event: our quantum open source hackathon unitaryHACK 2022: Register Now!

New from Unitary Fund

• Welcome Misty Wahl to the Unitary Fund Team! Misty will be joining as Member of Technical Staff with a focus on Mitiq.

• Two new Advisory Board members!

  • Amira Abbas, PhD student at the University of KwaZulu-Natal and Quantum Research Advocate at IBM

  • Stephen DiAdamo, Research Scientist at Cisco and author of the QuNetSim Python package (and fmr. Microgrant winner)

• IBM and Accenture are some of our newest additions to our member program as Core Members. We thank IBM and Accenture and look forward to furthering our mission with their support.

• Agnostiq has joined as a Unitary Fund Supporting Member. We’re excited to work with Agnostiq and making a step towards creating a strong ecosystem, together with our other Supporting Members – Xanadu, IonQ, BCG, Pasqal, IQM, and DoraHacks.

• Congratulations to Victory Omole for winning the 2021 Wittek Quantum Prize for his work on Google’s Cirq library and other open-source projects.

• Join us every other Thursday for QiR community calls on our Discord.

• Mitiq

  • We released version 0.12 through 0.13 of Mitiq (full changelog):

    • The 0.12 release contains a considerable overhaul of the documentation organization and content (special thanks to Misty Wahl and Purva Thakre!), check it out.

    • The 0.13 release is compatible with the latest Cirq version and contains GHZ circuit support (special thanks to Rahul Mistri). Two design documents, on learning-based PEC and digital dynamical decoupling were approved, thanks to Misty Wahl and Aaron Robertson. Thanks @astrojuanlu for useful suggestions about readthedocs, as we improved the HTML display of notebooks.

  • The 2022 Mitiq roadmap has been discussed and approved

  • We added a Projects Ideas section for students who may want to collaborate.

  • The Unitary Fund team, together with collaborators at Johns Hopkins, uploaded a paper with a study on how to reduce the impact of correlated noise on zero noise extrapolation.

  • The Unitary Fund team uploaded a paper showing the improvement of effective quantum volume with quantum error mitigation, using Mitiq.

New Grants

• To Ayush Tambde, secondary school student and quantum enthusiast – for developing HODL language designed to make it easy and intuitive to write arithmetic, relational, and logical operations for quantum programs: GitHub arXiv

• To Steven Thomson, Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at Freie Universität Berlin – for creating a new quantum technology podcast aimed at highlighting the diverse range of people who work in quantum technology.

• Unitary Fund became a sponsor for the Quantum Journal.

News from UF Projects

• QuTiP has been accepted for Google Summer of Code 2022. Applications for students open April 4th and close April 19th. Check out current Project Ideas.

• Blog: Implementing a Variational Quantum Algorithms module in QuTiP

  • QuTiP’s qutip-qip package consists of classes QubitCircuit and Gate, which simulate the dynamics of quantum circuits. For VQAs, these gates should be parameterized. In addition to the gate parameters, initialization options, which are fixed throughout the optimization process, will be easily defined in one object. For these purposes, we define two new classes, VQABlock and VQA, which are abstractions on Gate and QubitCircuit, respectively.

• Two papers on quantum open source software projects supported by the Unitary Fund were published in the open-access, community-driven journal Quantum.

  • The papers provide information on Pulser and qutip-qip, two Python packages for the pulse-level simulation of quantum programs on quantum computers.

• Blog: OQuPy: Open Quantum Systems in Python: A Python 3 package to efficiently compute non-Markovian open quantum systems.

  • Additions to the OQuPy package with hopes that they would further attract new users who might find some use of these in their own research.

    • Calculation of bath correlations from system correlations

    • Non-perturbative simulation of a system coupled to multiple environments

Coming up next quarter:

• unitaryHACK is returning in June 2022: Register Now!

• Boxi Li is giving a Quantum Software Talk on "QuTiP qip: Pulse-level circuits simulation" this Thursday April 7th at 6pm CET / 12pm ET, on Unitary Fund Twitch channel

• QuTiP is participating in Google Summer of Code 2022: Applications are open until April 19th, find guidelines and project ideas here.

• QCHack 2022 by the Quantum Coalition (Yale x MIT): quantumcoalition.io