Moffet Field, CA - September 28, 2018. Dr. David Bell, Director, USRA Research Institute for Advanced Computer Science and Chief Technologist, NASA Academic Mission Services was a keynote speaker at the Quantum Summit held in San Francisco on September 19, 2018.
His talk on the “Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab: Growing the Ecosystem for Quantum AI” generated much interest. He was also a panelist on a session entitled, “How should Enterprises prepare for the Quantum Revolution?” along with other panelists from Google, Morgan Stanley and Lockheed Martin.
David’s Keynote speech focused on a global issue – the competition of nations and companies in an international race for competitive advantage with quantum computing technologies. His talk delineated the three-way collaboration of the joint USRA-NASA-Google Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab, founded in 2012, which focuses on new Artificial Intelligence Algorithms and Hybrid Quantum-Classical Computing. This collaboration has engaged a growing network of government, industry and academic collaborators for quantum computing research in hardware, algorithms and applications, as well as for quantum workforce development.
The Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab has engaged over forty organizations including universities and startups, achieving significant scientific results and gains in workforce development. Scientific results, specifically in quantum approaches for planning and scheduling, machine learning, diagnostics, secure communications, and finance led to important conclusions. Workforce development results are evident in participants who graduated with Masters and Doctorate degrees focused on quantum computing, and who have joined the quantum workforce at USRA as well as at universities as tenure track faculty and research scientists, and as scientists at startups and larger industrial research organizations.
A long-term goal of this research collaboration is to develop quantum computing solutions that will solve with scale classes of problems dramatically faster than with classical computers.