Robyn Williams: And another quantum professional is Jayne Thompson, now in Singapore, again with Pauline Newman.

Pauline Newman: Where do you come from?

Jayne Thompson: I'm originally from Brisbane actually but I did a lot of my undergraduate and my PhD at the University of Melbourne.

Pauline Newman: So you're a quantum physicist. What do you study in particular?

Jayne Thompson: We do a lot of work on building better quantum devices for different technological applications. This can include things such as sensing or computing or quantum algorithms, even things such as cryptography and communication protocols.

But one of the things that I do a lot of work on is building quantum devices which generate predictions about the future. So something which may run you a forecasting or a prediction about what the events are going to be for a specific physical system in your environment based on the data you've collected so far about its past behaviour.

Quantum technologies right at the moment face a big problem with big data. This is a global problem, but in the case of the energy we expend to actually store data in servers, it can actually rival the costs of the global airline industry.

Pauline Newman: Really?

Jayne Thompson: Yes, actually data storage has humongous problems. It's actually having dramatic effects on the climate and on the budget of different countries, and this is a very big, pressing and growing problem in the sciences. So the devices we build allow you to generate predictions while tracking less information in the dataset, but you can still make the same forecasting predictions.

Pauline Newman: I know that quantum computers are a long way in the future, so what you're doing now, has it got any real-life practical value?

Jayne Thompson: There's a lot of investment and a lot of effort going on at the moment to develop them, and there has been quite a few breakthroughs in recent years, in particular Google announced a new chip.

Pauline Newman: What, a quantum chip?

Jayne Thompson: Yes, actually it is, it's a superconducting chip which is going to be a prototype for a new type of quantum computer, and they are going really well, actually, their engineering is really quite impressive. But quantum information is very fragile, and whenever the information accidentally interacts with something in the environment, we tend to lose some of it, it sort of dissipates into the environment, decoheres.

Pauline Newman: And you said that you were trying to look at problems and predict the future. Have you got a favourite sort of problem that you're looking at?

Jayne Thompson: So you might have something like the stock market or the weather system, and as long as it takes all the information, it takes long histories, to understand what it's going to do next, quantum devices seem to be very effectual at modelling these systems.

Pauline Newman: How did you end up in Singapore?

Jayne Thompson: That's a good question. They have a rather excellent Centre for Quantum Technologies. It's world-leading actually, particularly in theoretical quantum information science. A while ago I began visiting and talking to the people there, and I enjoyed my conversations, and I thought the stuff they did was very interesting, so that was sufficient to make me excited about the prospects.

Pauline Newman: Do you go back to Australia much?

Jayne Thompson: Yes, all the time. It's very nice to be so close to home, and there are some really good experimental groups in Australia. I think it's underappreciated, but Australia is one of the leading locations for quantum information science, and this applies to both their theorists, who are extremely good, and their experimentalists who really pack a punch, they pull above their weight. So we go back very regularly and we have a lot of collaborations with them. Yes, I really enjoy collaborating with Australians, the culture of the science there is really nice.

Pauline Newman: Thank you so much, Jayne.

Jayne Thompson: Thank you.

Robyn Williams: Jayne Thompson, based in Singapore, with Pauline Newman.

Excerpt from:
Reducing the data, energy and emissions of big data computing - ABC News