Dr. Mashrur “Ronnie” Chowdhury, our Center Director, is collaborating with our partner institutions–Benedict College, The Citadel, South Carolina State University, and the University of South Carolina–on artificial intelligence (AI) research using quantum computers. The goal is to improve future mobility through quantum machine learning algorithms. Benedict College has dedicated a lab for this where our students will be working supervised by the PIs of our consortium members. C2M2 is working towards establishing quantum labs at each of our partner institutions.
Quantum computing is an emerging research field. The idea started in the early 1980s. Since then, quantum algorithms have been making progress in parallel with the development of quantum computers. However, there are several obstacles to leveraging quantum computing’s full benefits, which need to be overcome through research. Some of the obstacles include physical design (e.g., fabrication, verification, architecture), scalability, decoherence or loss of information, error correction, and random qubit initialization. Moreover, new machine learning algorithms need to be developed for leveraging the full potential of quantum computers.
Theoretically, quantum algorithms can achieve quadratic speedup compared to classical algorithms. This is important for time-critical applications that require a significant computational resource. An emerging area of quantum computing research is quantum machine learning, which refers to the development of hybrid machine learning methods that involve both classical and quantum processing. The current research goal is to make quantum computers and quantum algorithms widespread so that they can be utilized in time-critical and safety-critical applications that require significantly faster computation which cannot be done through existing classical computers.