A close-up view of the IBM Q quantum computer. The processor is in the silver-colored cylinder.

Quantum computers are getting a lot more real. No, you won't be playing Call of Duty on one anytime soon. But Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Rigetti Computing and IBM all made important advances in 2019 that could help bring computers governed by the weird laws of atomic-scale physics into your life in other ways.

Google's declaration of quantum supremacywas the most headline-grabbing moment in the field. The achievement -- more limited than the grand term might suggest -- demonstrated that quantum computers could someday tackle computing problems beyond the reach of conventional "classical" computers.

Proving quantum computing progress is crucial. We're still several breakthroughs away from realizing the full vision of quantum computing. Qubits, the tiny stores of data that quantum computers use, need to be improved. So do the finicky control systems used to program and read quantum computer results. Still, today's results help justify tomorrow's research funding to sustain the technology when the flashes of hype inevitably fizzle.

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Quantum computers will live in data centers, not on your desk, when they're commercialized. They'll still be able to improve many aspects of your life, though. Money in your retirement account might grow a little faster and your packages might be delivered a little sooner as quantum computers find new ways to optimize businesses. Your electric-car battery might be a little lighter and new drugs might help you live a little longer after quantum computers unlock new molecular-level designs. Traffic may be a little lighter from better simulations.

But Google's quantum supremacy step was just one of many needed to fulfill quantum computing's promise.

"We're going to get there in cycles. We're going to have a lot of dark ages in which nothing happens for a long time," said Forrester analyst Brian Hopkins. "One day that new thing will really change the world."

Among the developments in 2019:

Classical computers, which include everything from today's smartwatches to supercomputers that occupy entire buildings, store data as bits that represent either a 1 or a 0. Quantum computers use a different approach called qubits that can represent a combination of 1 and 0 through an idea called superposition.

Ford and Microsoft adapted a quantum computing traffic simulation to run on a classical computer. The result: a traffic routing algorithm that could cut Seattle traffic congestion by 73%.

The states of multiple qubits can be linked, letting quantum computers explore lots of possible solutions to a problem at once. With each new qubit added, a quantum computer can explore double the number of possible solutions, an exponential increase not possible with classical machines.

Quantum computers, however, are finicky. It's hard to get qubits to remain stable long enough to return useful results. The act of communicating with qubits can perturb them. Engineers hope to add error correction techniques so quantum computers can tackle a much broader range of problems.

Plenty of people are quantum computing skeptics. Even some fans of the technology acknowledge we're years away from high-powered quantum computers. But already, quantum computing is a real business. Samsung, Daimler, Honda, JP Morgan Chase and Barclays are all quantum computing customers. Spending on quantum computers should reach hundreds of millions of dollars in the 2020s, and tens of billions in the 2030s, according to forecasts by Deloitte, a consultancy. China, Europe, the United States and Japan have sunk billions of dollars into investment plans. Ford and Microsoft say traffic simulation technology for quantum computers, adapted to run on classical machines, already is showing utility.

Right now quantum computers are used mostly in research. But applications with mainstream results are likely coming. The power of quantum computers is expected to allow for the creation of new materials, chemical processes and medicines by giving insight into the physics of molecules. Quantum computers will also help for greater optimization of financial investments, delivery routes and flights by crunching the numbers in situations with a large number of possible courses of action.

They'll also be used for cracking today's encryption, an idea spy agencies love, even if you might be concerned about losing your privacy or some snoop getting your password. New cryptography adapted for a quantum computing future is already underway.

Another promising application is artificial intelligence, though that may be years in the future.

"Eventually we'll be able to reinvent machine learning," Forrester's Hopkinssaid. But it'll take years of steady work in quantum computing beyond the progress of 2019. "The transformative benefits are real and big, but they are still more sci-fi and theory than they are reality."

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Quantum computing leaps ahead in 2019 with new power and speed - CNET

When asked what invention will be as revolutionary in the 2020s as smartphones were in the 2010s, Bank of America strategist Haim Isreal said, without hesitation, quantum computing.

At the banks annual year ahead event last week in New York, Israel qualified his prediction, arguing in an interview with MarketWatch that the timing of the smartphones arrival on the scene in the mid-2000s, and its massive impact on the American business landscape in the 2010s, doesnt line up neatly with quantum-computing breakthroughs, which are only now being seen, just a few weeks before the start of the 2020s.

The iPhone already debuted in 2007, enabling its real impact to be felt in the 2010s, he said, while the first business applications for quantum computing won't be seen till toward the end of the coming decade.

But, Israel argued, when all is said and done, quantum computing could be an even more radical technology in terms of its impact on businesses than the smartphone has been. This is going to be a revolution, he said.

Quantum computing is a nascent technology based on quantum theory in physics which explains the behavior of particles at the subatomic level, and states that until observed these particles can exist in different places at the same time. While normal computers store information in ones and zeros, quantum computers are not limited by the binary nature of current data processing and so can provide exponentially more computing power.

Quantum things can be in multiple places at the same time, said Chris Monroe, a University of Maryland physicist and founder of IonQ told the Associated Press . The rules are very simple, theyre just confounding.

In October, Alphabet Inc. GOOG, +0.39% subsidiary Google claimed to have achieved a breakthrough by using a quantum computer to complete a calculation in 200 seconds on a 53-qubit quantum computing chip, a task it calculated would take the fastest current super-computer 10,000 years. Earlier this month, Amazon.com Inc. AMZN, +0.66% announced its intention to collaborate with experts to develop quantum computing technologies that can be used in conjunction with its cloud computing services. International Business Machines Corp. IBM, +1.17% and Microsoft Corp. MSFT, +1.02% are also developing quantum computing technology.

Israel argued these tools will revolutionize several industries, including health care, the internet of things and cyber security. He said that pharmaceutical companies are most likely to be the first commercial users of these devices, given the explosion of data created by health care research.

Pharma companies are right now subject to Moores law in reverse, he said. They are seeing the cost of drug development doubling every nine years, as the amount of data on the human body becomes ever more onerous to process. Data on genomics doubles every 50 days, he added, arguing that only quantum computers will be able to solve the pharmaceutical industrys big-data problem.

Quantum computing will also have a major impact on cybersecurity, an issue that effects nearly every major corporation today. Currently cyber security relies on cryptographic algorithms, but quantum computings ability to solve these equations in the fraction of the time a normal computer does will render current cyber security methods obsolete.

In the future, even robust cryptographic algorithms will be substantially weakened by quantum computing, while others will no longer be secure at all, according to Swaroop Sham, senior product marketing manager at Okta.

For investors, Israel said, it is key to realize that the first one or two companies to develop commercially applicable quantum-computing will be richly rewarded with access to untold amounts of data and that will only make their software services more valuable to potential customers in a virtuous circle.

What weve learned this decade is that whoever controls the data will win big time, he said.

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Quantum computing will be the smartphone of the 2020s, says Bank of America strategist - MarketWatch

D-Wave Systems announced a partnership with Japanese industrial giant NEC today to build what they call hybrid apps and services that work on a combination of NEC high-performance computers and D-Waves quantum systems.

The two companies also announced that NEC will be investing $10 million in D-Wave, which has raised $204 million prior to this, according to Crunchbase data.

D-Waves chief product officer and EVP of R&D, Alan Baratz, whom the company announced this week will be taking over as CEO effective January 1st, says the company has been able to do a lot of business in Japan, and the size of this deal could help push the technology further. Our collaboration with global pioneer NEC is a major milestone in the pursuit of fully commercial quantum applications, he said in a statement.

The company says it is one of the earliest deals between a quantum vendor and a multinational IT company with the size and scale of NEC. The deal involves three key elements. First of all, NEC and D-Wave will come together to develop hybrid services that combine NECs supercomputers and other classical systems with D-Waves quantum technology. The hope is that by combining the classical and quantum systems, they can create better performance for lower cost than you could get if you tried to do similar computing on a strictly classical system.

The two companies will also work together with NEC customers to build applications that will take advantage of this hybrid approach. Also, NEC will be an authorized reseller of D-Wave cloud services.

For NEC, which claims to have demonstrated the worlds first quantum bit device way back in 1999, it is about finding ways to keep advancing commercial quantum computing. Quantum computing development is critical for the future of every industry tasked with solving todays most complex problems. Hybrid applications and greater access to quantum systems is what will allow us to achieve truly commercial-grade quantum solutions, Motoo Nishihara, executive vice president and CTO at NEC Corporation, said in a statement.

This deal should help move the companies toward that goal.

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D-Wave partners with NEC to build hybrid HPC and quantum apps - TechCrunch

A team of scientists from the University of Chicago discovered a method by which quantum states can be integrated and controlled in everyday electronics. The teams breakthrough research resulted in the experimental creation of what theyre dubbing a quantum FM radio to transmit data over long distances. This feels like an eureka moment for quantum computing.

The teams work involves silicon carbide, a naturally occurring semiconductor used to make all sorts of electronics including light emitting diodes (LEDs) and circuit boards. Its also used in rocketry due to its ability to withstand high temperatures and in the production of sand paper presumably because its coarse. What were excited about is its potential as a conduit for controlling quantum states.

Todays quantum computers under the IBM/Google/MIT paradigm are giant, unwieldy things that absolutely wont fit on your desktop. They require lasers and sub-zero temperatures to function. You need a team of physicists standing by in an expensive laboratory just to get started. But the University of Chicago teams work may change all that.

They used good old fashioned electricity, something were pretty good at controlling, to initiate and direct quantum states in silicon carbide. That means they didnt need fancy lasers, a super cold environment, or any of that mainframe-sized stuff to produce quantum results. This wasnt the result of a single experiment, but in fact involved two significant breakthroughs.

The first, the ability to control quantum states in silicon carbide, has the potential to solve quantum computings exotic materials problem. Silicon carbide is plentiful and relatively easy to work with compared to the standard-fair physicists use which includes levitated atoms, laser-ready metals, and perfectly-flawed diamonds. This is cool, and could fundamentally change the direction most quantum computing research goes in 2020 and beyond. But its the second breakthrough that might be the most exciting.

According to a press release from the University of Chicago, the teams method solves quantum computings noise problem. Per Chris Anderson, a co-author on the teams paper:

Impurities are common in all semiconductor devices, and at the quantum level, these impurities can scramble the quantum information by creating a noisy electrical environment. This is a near-universal problem for quantum technologies.

Co-author Alexandre Bourassa added:

In our experiments we need to use lasers, which unfortunately jostle the electrons around. Its like a game of musical chairs with electrons; when the light goes out everything stops, but in a different configuration. The problem is that this random configuration of electrons affects our quantum state. But we found that applying electric fields removes the electrons from the system and makes it much more stable.

The work is still early, but it has incredible implications for the field of quantum computing. With a little tweaking, it appears that this silicon carbide-based method of wrangling quantum states could lead us to the unhackable quantum communications network sooner than many experts believed. According to the team, it would work with the existing fiber optic network that already transmits 90 percent of the worlds data.

On the outside, a quantum FM radio, that essentially sends data along frequency-modulated waves, could augment or replace existing wireless communication methods and bring about an entirely new class of technology. Were thinking something like Star Treks TriCorders, a gadget that records environmental data, processes it instantly, and uses quantum AI to analyze and interpret the results.

For more information read the Chicago teams research papers here and here.

H/t: Phys.Org

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Double eureka: Breakthroughs could lead to quantum 'FM radio' and the end of noise - The Next Web

Its been six years since hackers linked with China breached the US Office of Personnel Managements computer system and stole sensitive information about millions of federal employees and contractors. It was the sort of information thats collected during background checks for security clearancesvery personal stuff. But not all was lost. Even though there were obviously some massive holes in the OPMs security setup, some of its data was encrypted. It was useless to the attackers.

Perhaps not for much longer. Its only a matter of time before even encrypted data is at risk. Thats the view of John Prisco, CEO of Quantum Xchange, a cybersecurity firm based in Bethesda, Maryland. Speaking at the EmTech Future Compute event last week, he said that Chinas aggressive pursuit of quantum computing suggests it will eventually have a system capable of figuring out the key to access that data. Current encryption doesnt stand much of a chance against a quantum system tasked with breaking it.

China is moving forward with a harvest today, read tomorrow approach, said Prisco. The country wants to steal as much data as possible, even if it cant access it yet, because its banking on a future when it finally can, he said. Prisco says the China is outspending the US in quantum computing 10 times over. Its allegedly spending $10 billion alone to build the National Laboratory for Quantum Information Sciences, scheduled to open next year (although this number is disputed). Americas counterpunch is just $1.2 billion over five years toward quantum information science. Were not really that safe, he said.

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Part of Chinas massive investment has gone toward quantum security itself, including the development of quantum key distribution, or QKD. This involves sending encrypted data as classical bits (strictly binary information) over a fiber-optic network, while sending the keys used to decrypt the information in the form of qubits (which can represent more than just two states, thanks to quantum superposition). The mere act of trying to observe the key changes its state, alerting the sender and receiver of a security breach.

Bu it has its limits. QKD requires sending information-carrying photons over incredibly long distances (tens to hundreds of miles). The best way to do this right now is by installing a fiber-optic network, a costly and time-consuming process.

Its not foolproof, either. The signals eventually scatter and break down over long stretches of fiber optics, so you need to build nodes that will continue to boost them forward. These networks are also point-to-point only (as opposed to a broadcast connection), so you can communicate with only one other party at a time.

Nevertheless, China looks to be all in on QKD networks. Its already built a 1,263-mile link between Beijing and Shanghai to deliver quantum keys. And a successful QKD demonstration by the Chinese Micius satellite was reported across the 4,700 miles between Beijing and Vienna.

Even Europe is making aggressive strides: the European Unions OPENQKD initiative calls for using a combination of fiber optics and satellites to create a QKD-safe communications network covering 13 nations. The US, Prisco argues, is incredibly far behind, for which he blames a lack of urgency. The closest thing it has is a 500-mile fiber-optic cable running down the East Coast. Quantum Xchange has inked a deal to use the cable to create a QKD network that secures data transfers for customers (most notably the financial companies based around New York City).

With Europe and China already taking QKD seriously, Prisco wants to see the US catch upand fast. Its a lot like the space race, he said. We really cant afford to come in second place.

Update: This story has been amended to note that the funding figures for the National Laboratory for Quantum Information Sciences are disputed among some experts.

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China is beating the US when it comes to quantum security - MIT Technology Review

IBM Research

In 1950, a man named John Bennett, an Australian employee of the now-defunct British technology firm Ferranti, created what may be historys first gaming computer. It could play a game called Nim, a long-forgotten parlor game in which players take turns removing matches from several piles. The player who loses is the one who removes the last match. For his computerized version, Bennett created a vast machine 12 feet wide, 5 feet tall, and 9 feet deep. The majority of this space was taken up by light-up vacuum tubes which depicted the virtual matches.

Bennetts aim wasnt to create a game-playing machine for the sake of it; the reason that somebody might build a games PC today. As writer Tristan Donovan observed in Replay, his superlative 2010 history of video games: Despite suggesting Ferranti create a game-playing computer, Bennetts aim was not to entertain but to show off the ability of computers to do [math].

Jump forward almost 70 years and a physicist and computer scientist named Dr. James Robin Wootton is using games to demonstrate the capabilities of another new, and equally large, experimental computer. The computer in this question is a quantum computer, a dream of scientists since the 1980s, now finally becoming a scientific reality.

Quantum computers encode information as delicate correlations with an incredibly rich structure. This allows for potentially mind-boggling densities of information to be stored and manipulated. Unlike a classical computer, which encodes as a series of ones and zeroes, the bits (called qubits) in a quantum computer can be either a one, a zero, or both at the same time. These qubits are composed of subatomic particles, which conform to the rules of quantum rather than classical mechanics. They play by their own rules a little bit like Tom Cruises character Maverick from Top Gun if he spent less time buzzing the tower and more time demonstrating properties like superpositions and entanglement.

I met Wootton at IBMs research lab in Zurich on a rainy day in late November. Moments prior, I had squeezed into a small room with a gaggle of other excited onlookers, where we stood behind a rope and stared at one of IBMs quantum computers like people waiting to be allowed into an exclusive nightclub. I was reminded of the way that people, in John Bennetts day, talked about the technological priesthood surrounding computers: then enormous mainframes sequestered away in labyrinthine chambers, tended to by highly qualified people in white lab coats. Lacking the necessary seminary training, we quantum computer visitors could only bask in its ambience from a distance, listening in reverent silence to the weird vee-oing vee-oing vee-oing sound of its cooling system.

Wottons interest in quantum gaming came about from exactly this scenario. In 2016, he attended a quantum computing event at the same Swiss ski resort where, in 1925, Erwin Schrdinger had worked out his famous Schrdinger wave equation while on vacation with a girlfriend. If there is a ground zero for quantum computing, this was it. Wotton was part of a consortium, sponsored by the Swiss government, to do (and help spread the word about) quantum computing.

At that time quantum computing seemed like it was something that was very far away, he told Digital Trends. Companies and universities were working on it, but it was a topic of research, rather than something that anyone on the street was likely to get their hands on. We were talking about how to address this.

Wootton has been a gamer since the early 1990s. I won a Game Boy in a competition in a wrestling magazine, he said. It was a Slush Puppy competition where you had to come up with a new flavor. My Slush Puppy flavor was called something like Rollin Redcurrant. Im not sure if you had to use the adjective. Maybe thats what set me apart.

While perhaps not a straight path, Wootton knew how an interest in gaming could lead people to an interest in other aspects of technology. He suggested that making games using quantum computing might be a good way of raising public awareness of the technology.He applied for support and, for the next year, was given to my amazement the chance to go and build an educational computer game about quantum computing. At the time, a few people warned me that this was not going to be good for my career, he said. [They told me] I should be writing papers and getting grants; not making games.

But the idea was too tantalizing to pass up.

That same year, IBM launched its Quantum Experience, an online platform granting the general public (at least those with a background in linear algebra) access to IBMs prototype quantum processors via the cloud. Combined with Project Q, a quantum SDK capable of running jobs on IBMs devices, this took care of both the hardware and software component of Woottons project. What he needed now was a game. Woottons first attempt at creating a quantum game for the public was a version of the game Rock-Paper-Scissors, named Cat-Box-Scissors after the famous Schrdingers cat thought experiment. Wootton later dismissed it as [not] very good Little more than a random number generator with a story.

But others followed. There was Battleships, his crack at the first multiplayer game made with a quantum computer. There was Quantum Solitaire. There was a text-based dungeon crawler, modeled on 1973s Hunt the Wumpus, called Hunt the Quantpus. Then the messily titled, but significant, Battleships with partial NOT gates, which Wootton considers the first true quantum computer game, rather than just an experiment. And so on. As games, these dont exactly make Red Dead Redemption 2 look like yesterdays news. Theyre more like Atari 2600 or Commodore 64 games in their aesthetics and gameplay. Still, thats exactly what youd expect from the embryonic phases of a new computing architecture.

If youd like to try out a quantum game for yourself, youre best off starting with Hello Quantum, available for both iOS and Android. It reimagines the principles of quantum computing as a puzzle game in which players must flip qubits. It wont make you a quantum expert overnight, but it will help demystify the process a bit. (With every level, players can hit a learn more button for a digestible tutorial on quantum basics.)

Quantum gaming isnt just about educational outreach, though. Just as John Bennett imagined Nim as a game that would exist to show off a computers abilities, only to unwittingly kickstart a $130 billion a year industry, so quantum games are moving beyond just teaching players lessons about quantum computing.Increasingly, Wootton is excited about what he sees as real world uses for quantum computing. One of the most promising of these is taking advantage of quantum computings random number generating to create random terrain within computer games. In Zurich, he showed me a three-dimensional virtual landscape reminiscent of Minecraft. However, while much of the world of Minecraft is user generated, in this case the blocky, low-resolution world was generated using a quantum computer.

Quantum mechanics is known for its randomness, so the easiest possibility is just to use quantum computing as a [random number generator], Wootton said. I have a game in which I use only one qubit: the smallest quantum computer you can get. All you can do is apply operations that change the probabilities of getting a zero or one as output. I use that to determine the height of the terrain at any point in the game map.

Plenty of games made with classical computers have already included procedurally generated elements over the years. But as the requirements for these elements ranging from randomly generated enemies to entire maps increase in complexity, quantum could help.

Gaming is an industry that is very dependent on how fast things run

Gaming is an industry that is very dependent on how fast things run, he continued. If theres a factor of 10 difference in how long it takes something to run that determines whether you can actually use it in a game. He sees today as a great jumping-on point for people in the gaming industry to get involved to help shape the future development of quantum computing. Its going to be driven by what people want, he explained. If people find an interesting use-case and everyone wants to use quantum computing for a game where you have to submit a job once per frame, that will help dictate the way that the technology is made.

Hes now reached the point where he thinks the race may truly be on to develop the first commercial game using a quantum computer. Weve been working on these proof-of-principle projects, but now I want to work with actual game studios on actual problems that they have, he continued. That means finding out what they want and how they want the technology to be [directed].

One thing thats for certain is that Wootton is no longer alone in developing his quantum games. In the last couple of years, a number ofquantum game jams have popped up around the world. What most people have done is to start small, Wootton said. They often take an existing game and use one or two qubits to help allow you to implement a quantum twist on the game mechanics. Following this mantra, enthusiasts have used quantum computing to make remixed versions of existing games, including Dr. Qubit (a quantum version of Dr. Mario), Quantum Cat-sweeper (a quantum version of Minesweeper), and Quantum Pong (a quantum version of, err, Pong).

The world of quantum gaming has moved beyond its 1950 equivalent of Nim. Now we just have to wait and see what happens next. The decades which followed Nim gave us MITs legendary Spacewar in the 1960s, the arcade boom of the 1970s and 80s, the console wars of Sega vs. Nintendo, the arrival of the Sony PlayStation in the 1990s, and so on. In the process, classical computers became part of our lives in a way they never were before. As Whole Earth Catalog founder Stewart Brand predicted as far back as 1972 Rolling Stone in his classic essay on Spacewar: Ready or not, computers are coming to the people.

At present, quantum gamings future is at a crossroads. Is it an obscure niche occupied by just a few gaming physics enthusiasts or a powerful tool that will shape tomorrows industry? Is it something that will teach us all to appreciate the finer points of quantum physics or a tool many of us wont even realize is being used, that will nevertheless give us some dope ass games to play?

Like Schrdingers cat, right now its both at once. What a superposition to be in.

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Inside the weird, wild, and wondrous world of quantum video games - Digital Trends

Technology and society are intertwined. Self-driving cars and facial recognition technologies are no longer science fiction, and data and efficiency are harbingers of this new world.

But these new technologies are only the beginning. In the coming decades, further advances in artificial intelligence and the dawn of quantum computing are poised to change lives in both discernible and inconspicuous ways.

Even everyday technology, like a smartphone app, affects people in significant ways that they might not realize, said Fermilab scientist Daniel Bowring. If there are concerns about something as familiar as an app, then we need to take more opaque and complicated technology, like AI, very seriously.

A two-day workshop took place from Oct. 31-Nov.1 at the University of Chicago to raise awareness and generate strategies for the ethical development and implementation of AI and quantum computing. The workshop was organized by the Chicago Quantum Exchange, a Chicago-based intellectual hub and community of researchers whose aim is to promote the exploration of quantum information technologies, and funded by the Kavli Foundation and the Center for Data and Computing, a University of Chicago center for research driven by data science and AI approaches.

Members of the Chicago Quantum Exchange engage in conversation at a workshop at the University of Chicago. Photo: Anne Ryan, University of Chicago

At the workshop, industry experts, physicists, sociologists, journalists and more gathered to learn, share insights and identify next steps as AI and quantum computing advance.

AI and quantum computing are developing tools that will affect everyone, said Bowring, a member of the workshop organizing team. It was important to us to get as many stakeholders in the room as possible.

Workshop participants listened to presentations that framed concerns such as power asymmetries, algorithmic bias and privacy before breaking out into small groups to deliberate these topics and develop actionable strategies. Groups reported to all attendees after each breakout session. On the last day of the workshop, participants considered how they would nurture the dialogue.

At one of the breakout sessions, participants discussed the balance between collaborative quantum computing research and national security. Today, the results of quantum computing research are dispersed in a wide variety of academic journals, and a lot of code is accessible and open source. However, because of its potential implications for cybersecurity and encryption, quantum computing is also of interest to national security, so it may be subject to intelligence and export controls. What endeavors, if any, should be open source or private? Are these outcomes realizable? What level of control should be maintained? How should these technologies be regulated?

Were already behind on setting ground rules for these technologies, which, if left to progress on their own, could increase power asymmetries in society, said Brian Nord, Fermilab and University of Chicago scientist and member of the workshop organizing team. Our research programs, for example, need to be crafted in a way that does not reinforce or exacerbate these asymmetries.

Workshop participants will continue the dialogue through online and in-person meetings to address key ethical and societal issues in the quantum and AI space. Potential future activities include writing proposals for joint research projects that consider ethical and societal implications, white papers addressed to academic audiences, and media editorials and developing community action plans.

Organizers are planning to hold a panel next spring to engage the public, as well.

The spring event will help us continue to spread awareness and engage a variety of groups on issues of ethics in AI and quantum computing, Nord said.

The workshop was sponsored by the Kavli Foundation in partnership with the Center for Data and Computing at the University of Chicago. Artificial intelligence and quantum information science are two of six initiatives identified as special priority by the Department of Energy Office of Science.

The Kavli Foundation is dedicated to advancing science for the benefit of humanity, promoting public understanding of scientific research, and supporting scientists and their work. The foundations mission is implemented through an international program of research institutes, initiatives and symposia in the fields of astrophysics, nanoscience, neuroscience, and theoretical physics, as well as the Kavli Prize and a program in public engagement with science. Visitkavlifoundation.org.

The Chicago Quantum Exchange catalyzes research activity across disciplines and member institutions. It is anchored by the University of Chicago, Argonne National Laboratory, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and includes the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Northwestern University and industry partners. Visit chicagoquantum.org.

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Shaping the technology transforming our society | News - Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory