Some of the most groundbreaking work in quantum computing is currently taking place in academia, and the more enterprising financial players are already partnering with universities and research institutes to gain first-mover advantage.

In the 1990s, when Bob Coecke decided to work toward a PhD in quantum foundations, he viewed it as a chance to earn his doctorate while practicing music. As he puts it, he saw the funding he received to spend four years at Vrije Universiteit Brussel as an opportunity to “jam.” But it was the guitar that ultimately was put on the backburner—at least in terms of Coecke becoming a professional.

In the 1990s, quantum science was not exactly a mainstream subject area. In fact, today Coecke recalls the discipline as being “suffocated.” The main problem, as he saw it, was that it was challenging to share information—the internet as we know it now was still in its infancy. Immediately after he finished his PhD, Coecke struggled to find work. As a result, he had to reposition himself as a specialist in logic and category theory.

Things have since worked out for Coecke, who is currently a professor of quantum foundations, logics and structures at Oxford University. While he worries about the general state of employment for those entering the job market today and in the future, he sees a burgeoning field in the world of quantum science that is hungry to hire talented, young scientists.

“I am very concerned with the career [prospects] of young people,” he says. “But now, in this sort of area, at the interface of quantum computing and quantum foundations, the job prospects are fantastic. It is almost the opposite of what it used to be. You have more of a chance of getting a job in this area than anything else.” 

Although quantum computing is still expected to be years away from mainstream commercialization, interest in it has been growing. While many banks and financial institutions have adopted a wait-and-see approach, others are taking a more active interest. 

One of the leading efforts in the space of collaborative research is unfolding through the IBM Q Network, a global community of tech companies, academic institutions, end-user firms and research labs working in quantum computing. Currently, more than 30 universities are collaborating through the network. According to Stefan Woerner, global leader for quantum finance and optimization at IBM Research, these universities are working to accelerate joint research in quantum computing, and develop curricula to help prepare students for careers that will be influenced by this next era of computing, across science and business. 

“We are working on multiple projects in quantum finance with academic and industrial members of the IBM Q Network, such as Keio University in Japan, and JP Morgan Chase,” Woerner says. “The projects range from research on applications, such as options pricing, to basic algorithmic research on improving more generic building blocks for quantum algorithms. We are looking into further improving the existing algorithms in terms of performance and resource requirements, as well as identifying new applications and use-cases where quantum computing may achieve an advantage.” 

All these applications have in common that some decision or analysis has to be done based on uncertainty and a quantum computer has the potential to handle this in a more efficient ways.

Stefan Woerner, IBM Research

Woerner says quantum computing may help speed up functions around portfolio optimization and risk analysis. “All these applications have in common that some decision or analysis has to be done based on uncertainty and a quantum computer has the potential to handle this in a more efficient ways,” he says. 

Among the founding members of the IBM Q Network is Barclays Bank, which joined in December 2017. “We partner closely with IBM via the IBM Q Network,” says Lee Braine, who works in the investment bank CTO office at Barclays. “It is this partnership where we have the business and domain and computer science experience that we can apply, and IBM has its quantum computing physicists with their deep knowledge. My observation has been that the inter-play of these two sets of people working together is where the magic happens. We are able to create proofs-of-concept that either side alone wouldn’t have been able to [achieve] otherwise.”  

• Barclays is nearly finished with its first major quantum computing experiment. Dr. Lee Braine walks through how the bank is experimenting with quantum computing and where the field is heading. Click here to read more.

Secrets to Successful Collaboration 

Ashley Montanaro holds the title of “Reader in Quantum Computation” at the School of Mathematics at the University of Bristol, and is a member of the Quantum Information Theory and Theory and Algorithms research groups. In his initial studies, he believes there are a few promising areas for quantum development, such as modeling complicated financial instruments and portfolio optimization.

“One reason that finance is potentially a promising area is that in finance there are some really tough optimization problems to solve, and people are using a lot of supercomputer time already to solve these, so, there might be some hope for some quantum speedup there,” he says. 

Additionally, advancements in other tangential industries will have profound effects on capital markets firms. Take, for instance, telecommunications. Montanaro recently worked on a project with BT and several other companies and universities—the project is funded by Innovate UK—which applied quantum algorithms to optimize telecoms networks, which would change the way that information is distributed for all industries. 

BT supplied a library of potential computational tasks that it thought could be interesting to solve. “They would come along and describe these tasks, and we would figure out somehow together which ones were likely to be amenable to a quantum speedup,” he says. “So, really, I think what can make these kinds of collaborations successful is where there is some kind of domain expertise from each of the partners that is really essential to understanding whether the problem could be solved with a quantum computer.” 

Additionally, the academic community is entering into the vendor space in order to lend their expertise and, hopefully, speed up advancements. Montanaro created a start-up called PhaseCraft, which is looking at applying quantum computers to problems related to simulations of quantum systems. And Oxford’s Coecke holds a part-time position at Cambridge Quantum Computers.

“What I have been asked to push within Cambridge Quantum Computers is quantum natural-language processing,” Coecke says. “There is actually only one paper that exists on that, and that is by me from a few years ago, but now we are going to push this a bit harder, and IBM has given us privileged access to their main big quantum computer. And there are things you can sort of already do, and we use some machine learning in that already. So you can actually put it on a machine already. I know other people in Cambridge Quantum Computers also did some machine learning on the same machine.” 

Educational Challenges 

Over the past 15 years, the focus for Coecke has been on replacing the complicated formulas of quantum mechanics with new ones that are entirely diagrammatical that he says are much easier to work with. He co-authored a book on the subject with Aleks Kissinger titled, Picturing Quantum Processes: A First Course in Quantum Theory and Diagrammatic Reasoning.

 He likens his pictorial formulas of quantum mechanics to a programming language.

“Quantum technologies are going to spread around, and automated programmers have to work with these things,” he says. “We need better formulas, and we need better languages, and this is the number one candidate [for exploration] right now.”  

While the subject matter is complex, Coecke believes that it’s important for universities and other players in the space to start reaching out to high school students to better prepare them for this emerging field. So he and his team go into high schools with these pictorial formulas and have the students work toward solving university-level exams in quantum mechanics and related areas. 

He’s very pleased with the results thus far.

“We’ve already done some pilots and they can actually do this,” he says. “They can out-perform university students using the usual complicated mathematic formulas. So I think it is a necessary thing to have if it is going to become really widespread technology—you need these simpler formulas.” 

In addition, Coecke is writing a book on quantum computing for high school students, which he says will be a technical publication, rather than a popular science work. 

According to Coecke, academics are usually happy to work with people in the industry, and there’s also a logical reason for that: funding. He says it is typically easier to get the money from the finance sector and other industries to work on cutting-edge projects than from standard grant organizations, where they have to go through competitions, which can sometimes be random in their decisions.

Many people in the industry have heard of the term quantum computing, and they are aware that quantum computers are able to perform various functions in a way that classical computers cannot. Translating that awareness into C-level understanding, managerial appetite to engage in proofs of concept, and then building development capability is a challenge for every institution. 

Lee Braine, Barclays

What is clear is that more collaboration in the area of quantum computing can only be a good thing, says Barclays Braine. 

“Many people in the industry have heard of the term quantum computing, and they are aware that quantum computers are able to perform various functions in a way that classical computers cannot,” he says. “Translating that awareness into C-level understanding, managerial appetite to engage in proofs of concept, and then building development capability is a challenge for every institution. We have started on that journey and we think it has been fruitful. We have learned a lot, we have a good understanding of the opportunities and challenges, and we would encourage others to go on that journey as well.”

He sees opportunities for both collaboration and competition in quantum computing.  He also says regulators and central banks could get involved, not just in terms of the understanding and appreciating the opportunities, but also the threat timeline around new risks that quantum could potentially introduce to the markets. 

He points to Barclays and JP Morgan’s work with the IBM Q network. “I would expect that over time there will be more collaboration across the industry, whether that is driven by academic groups bringing in sponsoring financial institutions, financial market infrastructures bringing in members, or technology vendors that have banks participating in their research programs,” Braine says. “We would be supportive of industry initiatives that are looking to improve quantum computing progress by encouraging collaboration across banks.”

Dimitri van Esch’s primary role at ABN Amro is to look at new technologies that could be applicable for the bank, with an outlook of five years and beyond. Last year, he visited IBM’s Think conference in Las Vegas and came across quantum computing. The bank has since started exploring the technology.

He, too, is supportive of collaboration with other banks. 

“One of our objectives in doing this and being the front-runner in working together with quantum developers is to speed up this creation of this consortium, or creation of an ecosystem, where there will be more end-users working together with quantum developers and therefore also making things better and safer,” van Esch says. “You can’t do this on your own. We are not working on our own. …We might need other banks or other end-user enterprises to help us to be able to fully create the right system. We invite others to join us in this venture.”

Stacey Jeffery, a senior researcher at Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI), a public academic institute in the Netherlands, says that perhaps the most important first step is to grow the pool of potential experts in the field, and that will start at the academic level. “I definitely think the first step is just to make it part of undergraduate education, because even many undergraduates in computer science don’t take a quantum computing course,” she says. 

She thinks it is a reasonable guess that within the next 10 years, banks will at least be interacting with someone who has a quantum computer—several are already on this path with IBM Q—if not having their own quantum computer, though that prediction is murkier. “It could happen sooner, it could also happen later. It is really difficult to say,” she says. 

Path to Quantum Supremacy

Jeffery says some of the industry people they have met have an attitude that quantum computers would be interesting for the future, but there is nothing they can do with it now. Others are enthusiastic about investigating what can be done in the near future, and getting ready for when quantum computers arrive. 

“A lot of things right now are pretty speculative, and it is definitely not clear what the short-term implications will be, but [it] still [needs] to be investigated, for sure,” Jeffery says.

Developments in the world of quantum computing and quantum mechanics are happening fast and are unfolding in unpredictable ways. There’s no telling when true quantum supremacy—the point at which quantum computers rather than traditional computers are relied upon to solve complex problems—will happen. In the next few years, though, IBM believes that the deployment of quantum computing will reach beyond the research lab. 

“Quantum computing will be used extensively by new categories of professionals and developers looking to this emerging method of computing to solve problems once considered unsolvable,” says IBM’s Woerner. “From computer science courses to chemistry and business classes, students should become familiar with this technology and consider career paths rooted in quantum computing.”