Of course, I am riffing on Atlantic Quantum (a Neotribe investment, that was acquired by Google earlier this month, as I wrote in Tayur Poetry Fund) for the title to post on the INFORMS Annual Meeting, held in Atlanta this year (see Indianapolis 50 for the last one I attended, in 2022), where I had a Keynote on Quantum, a Tutorial on Quantum and also was on a Panel on Quantum.
Imagine my delight this morning, as I was flying back to Pittsburgh, that Lisa Su (CEO of AMD) was on the TV on the Delta flight, talking about Quantum!
Indeed, here is the AMD-IBM partnership:
AMD quietly cracks opens quantum opportunity
A massive new breakthrough just put AMD and IBM on quantum’s toughest hurdle: fixing its mistakes quickly enough to make it useful.
Quantum error correction is arguably the most challenging part of the field. It might be compared to catching dozens of ping-pong balls in a dark room without letting any drop. Each quantum bit is fragile, and errors can accumulate rapidly.
IBM’s new real-time decoder is essentially a dependable glove in that analogy, detecting and correcting those slip-ups before they spread out. The big news is that it runs on off-the-shelf AMD FPGAs (from its Xilinx line) and is still able to hit latency targets with nearly 10× headroom.
Indeed, this is an important milestone as IBM has published a timeline that I presented in my Keynote (thanks to the slides from Stefan Worner).
I am looking forward to writing an article based on this Keynote, for Informs Journal of Data Science, invited by EIC Yu Ding, finalized over Margharita pizza (along with Tinglong Dai at Max Coal Oven Pizzeria).
It was wonderful to catch up with many folks, including Tepper PhD alums – Jay Swaminathan, Tinglong Dai, Pinar Keskinocak, John Turner, Harish Gurnani, Srinivas Bollapragada, Ramesh Bollapragada, Kyra Gan, Vince Slaugh, Savannah Tang, Suresh Sethi, M.S Krishnan, Franco Berbeglia, Thiago Serra, and Helen Zhou – along with several other co-authors and friends (really too many to list here!), including at the (perhaps too) well-attended CMU Reception (which ran out of food before I arrived!) and the INFORMS Fellows Lunch.
Let me give a shout out to my current PhD student Satyam Verma who was Runner-up at the HAS Student Paper Competition for GenEx.
Atlanta certainly has many great restaurants: Bulla Gastrobar (with Stephen Biller, David Simch-Levi and Michelle Wu), Nan Thai Fine Dining (excellent Pad Thai and Crispy Okra, with Jay Swaminathan, M.S. Krishnan, Param Vir Singh and Ramayya Krishnan), and Blue India (yes, had a Mango Martini, which was pretty good actually, with Anuj Mehrotra, now Dean at Scheller, who gave me a quick tour of their building, next to the new tower that will open next year).
And, enjoyed my first Waymo ride, as it weaved through traffic, changing lanes, making difficult left turns, in decent traffic, and in my view, indistinguishable in driving performance from a human Uber driver.
Glad that my flight was on time, unaffected by weather or ATC ground halts, and now off to teach my MBA class!
