Introduction to Quantum Software Development Course

This course is organized by the MITRE Corporation and being offered as part of the IEEE Boston Section’s professional development program.

 

Summary:

In recent years, there has been an enormous surge of interest in quantum computing. Government, academic, and commercial organizations have spent billions of dollars attempting to create reliable, general-purpose quantum computers. These systems leverage the unusual properties of quantum mechanics to perform computations that could never be performed on conventional computers in our lifetime. Such calculations have a wide range of applications, including:

• Breaking certain cryptographic algorithms
• Engineering new materials
• Simulating how systems behave in extreme environments
• Finding new medicines that target specific diseases
• Building secure transmission channels that cannot be eavesdropped

How do quantum computers accomplish these bold claims? How could we use this technology to tackle our most difficult challenges? And how do programmers like you access it? In this course, we will explore the answers to these questions and help you unlock the ability to write quantum software and simulate quantum algorithms. Students should bring some basic programming experience and an open mind as we delve into a new computing paradigm.

Format: Live virtual lectures with self-paced exercises.

Target Audience:  Practicing software engineers.  Objective:  Develop the practicable skills needed to implement and study quantum algorithms in software.

Prerequisites:

Students are assumed to have exposure to the following concepts:

• Complex numbers
• Vectors & Matrices
• Bra-ket and tensor notation
• Digital information
• Endianness
• Digital logic
• Low- and high-level programming
• Visual Studio

Learning materials covering the course prerequisites will be provided in advance. This way, students can fill in any gaps in their knowledge and everyone starts on the same page on day 1.

Outline:

The course consists of live lectures interspersed with lab exercises in Visual Studio. All the materials are available in the form of an online course guide, so students can learn at their own pace both during and outside of class time. To mitigate technical difficulties, each student is provided remote access to a virtual machine with a preconfigured environment. The following topics are covered:

• Qubits and quantum gates
• Multi-qubit systems
• Quantum circuits
• Quantum protocols
• Quantum algorithms
• Q# programming

The Visual Studio exercises are Q# operations that must be implemented correctly for a unit test to pass. This approach allows students to get immediate feedback on how well they understand a concept. We use the Discord platform as a course forum, where students can ask questions at any time and collaborate on solving the coding challenges.

Instructor Bio:

Richard Preston is a lead engineer at the MITRE Corporation. He graduated Tufts University in 2019 with an MS in Electrical Engineering and BS in Computer Engineering. Since then, Richard has worked on R&D projects spanning a wide variety of technology areas, including network security, machine learning, cloud & edge computing, IT automation, software engineering, and quantum computing. Currently, he leads a research effort aimed at helping software engineers apply quantum algorithms to real-world problems. Richard has taught quantum software development at MITRE, MIT’s Beaver Works Summer Institute, IEEE Boston, and Tufts University, and is passionate about helping to grow the quantum-capable workforce.

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