Industrial Doctorate: QUARTIC (QUantum ARtificial intelligence Techniques In reinforCement learning)


In September 2019 Quasar submitted in collaboration with the Department of Theoretical Physics at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid a project called QUARTIC to the Industrial Doctorate programme of the Comunidad de Madrid. We are happy to announce that our 3 year project has been accepted and we plan to start working on it as soon as January 2020.

The objective of this industrial PhD is to apply Quantum Computing techniques to the Artificial Intelligence (AI) field in order to solve industry real problems, specifically, Quantum Computing applied to supervised learning with special attention to Reinforcement Learning. Besides, supervised and unsupervised learning will be also explored.

Quantum Computing is a new paradigm that takes advantage of the quantum properties of the particles in order process information. Thanks to the superposition and the entanglement it is possible to execute operations with qubits faster than with bits. Besides, operations can be executed simultaneously over multiple entangled qubits. This represents an evolution in computer science because it helps to keep increasing the processing capacity of computers.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is one of the computer areas that will benefit the most from this performance improvement. There are many areas in AI but most of them have the common feature of the necessity of high computing capacity. The majority of the learning algorithms have to work in a large state space (NPhard problems). For this reason, the intersection between Quantum Computing and Artificial Intelligence could be a symbiosis that causes a radical change in the technology.

Nowadays, there are quantum algorithms in the academic world that work with a small number of qubits and which are not able to surpass the classic algorithms. However, the improvement of quantum algorithms is constant, so it is evident that these algorithms will improve the results of classical algorithms in specific areas. Big companies such as IBM, Google, Intel o Microsoft and startups as Rigetti, decided to invest in this new way of computation. Quantum Artificial Intelligence is a promising field due to the high computing requirements of this kind of algorithms. The collaboration tandem of companies and universities has proven to be very beneficial for both.

The main goal of this project is to;

  • Develop Quantum Artificial Intelligence algorithms and make them attractive and useable at an industrial level.

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