NYC Quantum Summit

Last week I attend the 5th annual NYC Quantum Summit, hosted at NYU. The best part of the summit, besides the view over Washington Square Park, was how widely attended the event was by a range of participants, including academics, industry professionals, VCs and investment firms, and government representatives. It is clear, in particular with the recent Mayor’s quantum stake announcement, that New York City is aiming to be the quantum hub of the United States. I’ve heard this year’s host, NYU’s quantum director and my former professor Javad Shabani, remark, at a prior Quantum Harlem event, something along the lines of, “This is New York, we should be able to be the best in the world at quantum research.” I cannot agree more! It was a pleasure running into several old friends from NYU as well as getting to meet many new wonderful and interesting people.

As someone with a strong interest in the quantum networking and cryptography side of things, I enjoyed Qunnect’s cofounder Mehdi Namazi give a presentation demonstrating practical deployment of a Quantum Position Verification protocol just down the road from my apartment at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. The GothamQ network scale results were also impressive, although it was a shame to see no CUNY nodes on the network yet, surely we’ll have to fix this soon! It was great to get to meet others in the quantum networking and cryptography community, especially former CUNY graduate students who are now making waves in the field like Dainamiq’s CEO and co-founder Marianna Bonanome.

The shadow of AI loomed over the summit, in the wake of recent mathematics breakthroughs and cybersecurity risk incidents, with many attendees discussing the potential for AI to accelerate both scientific discovery and the emergence of new security threats. Microsoft’s Charles Tahan was particularly vocal about the potential implications of AI on how scientific research is conducted. His remarks were perhaps more bullish and less risk-conscious than my own, but it is certainly clear that AI is changing the way we approach scientific inquiry and security considerations. There were also people there who were putting the social and equity implications of quantum tech front and centre, promoting quantum education in underserved communities through organisations such as the wonderful Quantum Africa. I want to setup some website space promoting equity and inclusion in the quantum community somewhere on my site with a list of relevant organisations and initiatives, so stay tuned!

Money talks, as they say, so the VC panel discussion was practically shouting. It was insightful to hear the perspectives of those people who don’t have the technological passion but are deeply invested in a quantum future. I appreciated their frankness regarding investment horizons being at least a decade from now. I was surprised that, when pressed to choose a hardware paradigm, trapped ions was named as the front runner. For the record, which I may live to regret, I’m a neutral atom kinda guy. I’ll finish with the two sentence starters the VC panel suggested be included in any quantum pitch.

1. Why am I excited about my company/this technology?
2. Why is quantum needed for this task?