Transcript

Rene – Hi, welcome to QuBites, your bite-sized pieces of quantum computing. My name is Rene from Valorem Reply and today we're going to recap season four. And since I'm recording this right now, when there's the so-called holiday season, I don't have a Santa Claus or anything today for you but I have something special which a few of you may have not seen before- a so-called Räuchermann which you can see here in the background and what that is, it's basically a little figure here that is used to or you can also translate to incense smoker which is an invention of toy makers in the Erzgebirge in the ore mountains, which is basically my home region where i'm originally from. Well, they make these Räuchermann original manner and basically you put in incense cone in here. As you can see it's right now burning one here and that produces of course smoke and this one is a little bit special because this one is actually as you might be able to see here, the smoke is coming out of the head of the gentleman here and so the head is smoking if you will, right from all the crazy content here with QuBites, which is something that happened to me quite a few times while I was recording season four here with all the amazing guests. They shot a lot of knowledge and I had a few times where my head was also smoking a little bit because there was so much amazing input! But anyhow, this is what we and the at Erzgebirge put in our houses during Christmas and we burnt these. This is a special one because like it's a computer guy just like me, right, and of course a little bit old as you can see here. But yeah, it had a smoking so while we talk about the recap of season four, he will sit there in the background and smoke his head a little bit.

But anyhow, like I said, you know we have a lot of amazing guests and I learned a lot and I hope you also learned as much as I did and it was a valuable time for you as was for me. For example, we started season four episode one with Dr. Johannes Oberreuter, when we talked about quantum machine learning in particular for image classification and he was telling us about his hybrid approach there and you know the immense potential it already has currently, even with the limited amount of qubits we have with the real quantum computing hardware. After that we talked with Vincent Van Wingerden, from Microsoft about Microsoft's Quantum Katas and his contribution to it, because he's very much involved in it and he talked to us about the Microsoft quantum Katas, an amazing way to actually learn Q# and QDK. So, if you're interested in that, make sure to check if you want to learn Q# and QDK. Then in episode three of season four, we covered approachable quantum algorithmic design with Yuval Boger from Classiq and he explained to us how to make quantum computing more approachable, not just for quantum scientists and also how to find the most optimal quantum algorithm semi automatically, which is pretty impressive.

Santanu Ganguly from Cisco talked with us about quantum computing in the enterprise world, which is of course a very much important topic but then also Santanu explained to us how quantum machine learning works and he also covers that in his book, so you also might want to check out his quantum machine learning book as well. Then we had an episode about quantum computing for life sciences and pharma, where I had the pleasure to talk with Ivan Ostojic from Mckinsey and that was a great conversation where we covered all the field there and also he hinted that there's a lot of hype in the current market right now and that might result in, you know, wrong predictions and he basically said, hey, be a little bit cautious with that and was a great conversation for sure and something you definitely want to check out.

In episode six, we continued our quantum algorithm design topic and we talked about how to best deal with the complexities of quantum computing and quantum algorithmic design and I talked with professor Robert Wille and he explained that topic really well. And then with Denise Ruffner, I talked about scalable quantum computing and the unique approach they're using at the company Denise works for. And an even more important topic we also covered, which is dear to my heart about diversity in quantum computing, right, and Denise talked with us about the Women in Quantum initiative which she is leading and that was a great conversation as well. So definitely also check them out. In general check them all out of course, right? And then we talked about the BMW Quantum Computing Challenge with Dr. Marine Pigneur and she continued that QML conversation I started with Johannes and also had with Santanu. Marine really explained beautifully how and why quantum machine learning actually works so well, leveraging superposition for representing the states you have in the neural network for the weights and what not, how you can represent that with this hybrid approach where you inject a quantum layer and she explained it beautifully. Also of course, you know, talking about the BMW Quantum Challenge, she also explained to us what they built there and the in fact remarkable results they already have achieved. So again, check it out.

For episode nine, I had not one but two guests and they were Marlen Gaus and Franz Sitzmann from a Junge Tüftler, who both work on this great projects for innovative quantum education and in general also produce a lot of amazing content and learning paths and a lot of amazing stuff for education especially in the STEM discipline. Currently they are focusing on their quantum 101 project, aiming the children and teenagers to, you know, get them excited and educated about quantum computing. So, how can we basically enable the next generation, and they built some amazing content there as well, as some experiments and you know, amazing things you can actually try out quantum computing without actually having to build a real quantum computer.

So much amazing stuff, and well, now we're here at the summary of season four already. Well, I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did. For me, I can tell you it's always a big pleasure to host all these amazing guests and you know, to talk with them and to pick their brain right and get all the insights and all the knowledge transferred. I hope you also got something out of that and as you can imagine we're already thinking about season five, the next one. I want to hear from you. Please tell us, reach out what is your feedback for the previous episodes, for all the seasons we recorded. What did you like, what did you not like, and maybe you also have a suggestion for a new topic, or you have a suggestion for a guest we should interview or maybe you could actually be a guest? So, you know, don't be shy. Reach out, tell us, everything is fair. Use the general channels, right reach out to me, reach out over our social media channels, the website, where you can find all the information, of course, also about our previous episodes, where you can re-watch all of them. And make sure to subscribe and to hear all about the next season and once we start publishing new episodes. Check out our website, if you want to re-watch or watch brand new some of the previous episodes. We have quite some content there, already now within total 40 episodes. So again, check those out and send us our feedback. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did. Stay well, stay safe and thank you so much for joining us, Bye-bye!