The German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy (BMWi) announced the 16 winners of the Artificial Intelligence Innovation Competition. Among them is PlanQK, which will now be funded with eleven million euros over three years (from January 2020 to December 2022). As one of the original applicants in the planning phase of PlanQK, LMU Munich’s QAR Lab is particularly excited to be conducting research with our partners on the linking of AI and quantum computing in practice and making these technologies easily accessible for industrial applications as part of the project. The main page of LMU already reported.

On May 9, the first workshop on PlanQK took place in Stuttgart. At these workshops, we want to discuss the opportunities and risks of the modern technology of artificial intelligence and the possibilities of the upcoming quantum hardware in discussion with industry partners and work out the benefits for the economy. Christoph Roch from QAR-Lab was also one of the participants.

On May 2 and 3, 2019, the consortium of the PlanQK project met in Berlin. Partners of all consortium partners were present; these are besides the Chair of Mobile and Distributed Systems still:
StoneOne AG is an experienced partner for software marketplaces and service as well as IoT platforms.
HQS Quantum Simulations GmbH specializes in quantum mechanical material simulations and also pursues the use of AI.
The Institute for Architecture of Application Systems (IAAS) and the Institute for Functional Matter and Quantum Technologies (FMQ) at the University of Stuttgart and the Center for Integrated Quantum Science and Technology IQST have extensive project experience in the areas of middleware, services and DSLs as well as quantum technologies and quantum networks.
The QAR-Lab was represented by Christoph Roch and Thomas Gabor. We are looking forward to a successful project!

The German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy (BMWi) is funding the project “Platform and Ecosystem for Quantum-Assisted Artificial Intelligence (PlanQK), in which the Chair of Mobile and Distributed Systems is also involved. The funding for PlanQK comes as part of the innovation competition “Artificial Intelligence as a Driver for Economically Relevant Ecosystems“, which aims to “quickly get AI out of the research labs and onto the streets,” said German Economics Minister Peter Altmaier in a press release. More information on PlanQK, which combines the core topics of quantum computing and artificial intelligence, can be found on the PlanQK website.

The second European D-Wave User Conference Qubits Europe 2019 took place in Milan on March 26-27. The conference was attended by speakers from D-Wave and various users from the D-Wave community. Sebastian Feld, Thomas Gabor and Christoph Roch gave a site report on the activities and research results of the QAR Lab.

Last Wednesday, April 3, 2019, Dr. Sebastian Feld and Thomas Gabor gave a keynote “On Quantum Computing” at the infineon Deep Learning Symposium. The basic idea of the talk was to shed light on how the immense resource requirements when using artificial intelligence can be mastered.

QAR-Lab employee Dr. Sebastian Feld was interviewed by the team of the 3sat program Scobel. In the program with the topic “Rätselhafte Welt der Quanten” (Enigmatic World of Quanta) a short contribution on the current status quo on the topic of quantum computers was produced. The contribution was published on March 28 and can also be viewed in the media library.