Corporate Liaison Program 2019

The world is racing towards a future in which quantum technologies will have a profound impact on society, business and industry. Because of this, on October 25, ICFO hosted the 2019 Corporate Liaison Program Day, focusing on Quantum Techs for Artificial Intelligence. On this day, members of ICFO’s Corporate Liaison Program had the opportunity to interact with worldwide experts in the field to have a grasp of what is occurring in the region and beyond.

This edition included speakers from leading international companies that discussed R&D, policy, entrepreneurship and business development, all in the quantum tech arena.

The event commenced with a welcoming from ICFO’s Director, Lluis Torner, who addressed the audience giving insights on why ICFO hosted the 2019 Corporate Liaison Day focused on quantum technologies and quantum machine learning.

Then, participants of the event had the opportunity to learn about the experiences and advances in quantum technologies for artificial intelligence from the following invited speakers:

• Paul Kristan Temme, researcher, IBM , US
• Maria Schuld, researcher, Xanadu and University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa
• Witold Kowalczyk, Director European Business Development, Zapata Computing Inc., US
• Mark Fingerhuth, Co-Founder and Head of R&D, ProteinQure Inc., US

Kristan Temme, a research staff member from IBM, gave general insight about Quantum Machine Learning and how to deal with coherence and error rates as well as noise for the advancement in the development of quantum computing.

Subsequently, Witold Kowalczyk, Director European Business Development from Zapata Computing, gave an overview of the company and what current challenges and applications in Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence quantum computing is trying to solve.

As for Mark Fingerhuth, co-founder and head of R&D from ProteinQure Inc., he focused more on Quantum Machine Learning for life sciences.

Finally, Maria Schuld, researcher at Xanadu and University of Kwazul-Natal, South Africa, gave an overview of what the company is doing and how it is engaging with the full-stack quantum computing processes: hardware + software + algorithms + services.