Introduction to Quantum Software Development Course

Web-based Course with live Instructor!

Times & Dates: 6 – 8PM ET, February 8, 9, 10, 15, 16, 17, 22, 23, 24

Course Format: Live lectures interspersed with lab exercises in Visual Studio

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.

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.

©2021 The MITRE Corporation. All Rights Reserved.
Approved for Public Release; Distribution Unlimited.
Public Release Case Number 21-3742.

Decision (Run/Cancel) Date for this Course is: Thursday, February 3, 2022

Co-sponsored by: MITRE Corporation

Speaker(s): Joe Clapis, Richard Preston

Boston, Massachusetts, United States, Virtual: https://events.vtools.ieee.org/m/292972