Qiskit Camp Africa Experience
Qiskit Camps are events where an immersive experience that consists of training sessions and deep technical talks about Quantum computing. A hackathon organized alongside by the Qiskit core development team also happens there. At Qiskit Camp, attendees can collaborate with both quantum researchers and computer scientists to connect with the larger global quantum community. Qiskit is an open-source software framework used to program quantum computers. The framework is written in python. In these camps, researchers, educators, and professionals are required to develop applications using Qiskit to illustrate the prowess of quantum computing or improving the performance of Qiskit. Qiskit is highly maintained by the IBM Q team and the Qiskit developer community contributions. You can read more about Qiskit here:
My journey to Qiskit Camp
It was on October 29th, 2019 when the chair of Women in Computing at the University of Cape Town, Kgomotso Welcome, contacted me inquiring me whether I had heard about Qiskit Africa Camp. I responded to her that I had never heard anything about Qiskit. She narrated to me that it was a quantum computing-related event. This sparked my curiosity and I ended up googling and taking a crash course on quantum computing. I was lucky to get the IBM Qiskit Medium page and as soon as I started to read through; things felt too difficult to grasp. I started to watch youtube videos and I felt it was something fascinating. I felt motivated to attend the camp. I inquired from Kgomotso what was the process and she was kind enough to forward me an email she had received from Waheeda Saib who is IBM Q ambassador and Qiskit Advocate in Johannesburg IBM Research lab. The email indicated that I was to be nominated to attend the Qiskit Camp. Since Kgomotso was the Chairperson of the Women in Computing, she was kind enough to nominate me to attend the Camp. Moreover, she advised me to keep learning about Qiskit and quantum computing. Meanwhile, I learnt that there was a two-week quantum Computing summer school at the University of Witwatersrand before the Qiskit Camp. I decided to apply for the summer school so as to prepare myself for the Qiskit Camp even though I had not received official acceptance from the Qiskit Team. I was just motivated to learn about a new computing paradigm.
Wits Quantum computing Summer School
The summer school was organized by the Wits quantum team. Participants were from over 14 countries around Africa. The summer school was organized in such a way that in the morning there were classes and in the afternoons there were lab sessions. The lecturers/presenters were composed of researchers from IBM, professionals from the industry and postgraduate students from the University of Witwatersrand and University of Kwa-Zulu Natal. The summer school taught us the basics of quantum computing, quantum computing algorithms, quantum machine learning, current IBM Q architecture, quantum hardware benchmarking, Components of Qiskit(Aqua, Terra, Aer, and Ignis), basics of IBMQ Experience and many more. The material that was covered can be found here:
I was fortunate enough to meet many researchers who work with quantum computers and who also have done a lot of research in quantum computing. Through conversations, they could be seen so passionate about quantum computing. It was evident that they came from different backgrounds namely mathematics, computer science, computer engineering, electrical engineering, chemistry, theoretical physics, and finance. This shows how broad quantum computing is. The summer school ended up with a poster session where me and my team made a poster whose title was “The Basics of Quantum Computing. ”
More pictures can be found here:
Qiskit Camp Africa 2019-Johannesburg South Africa
After the Summer school; it was now time to go and practice what we had learnt from the summer school. The Qiskit Camp Africa was held at Kwa-Maritane bush lodge in Northwest province. The lodge is located in the Pilansberg National reserve. This is a short video from the gate:
The IBM Q team welcomed everyone during the first night. The IBMers introduced what was expected of the participants and gave a quick crash introduction of Quantum computing. All the participants were advised to post their hackathons ideas on the following GitHub link to allow them to get project partners.
On the second day of the Camp; the participants were organized into teams where each team was assigned a coach. The early hours of the hackathon were coupled with WiFi problems which got later solved but also led to one group creating a problem to work on. The team worked on a quantum algorithm to help the organizing team to place the routers in a strategic position in the hacking room to allow maximum output and usage. My team was assigned to work on clustering malaria drug data using Maxcut Algorithm. Most of my team members had no experience in Quantum computing and that meant me and the coach had to spend a considerable amount of time teaching our team members about the basics of quantum computing. After 24 hours of hacking; we managed to produce this code and presentation.
Award ceremony.
It was now the awards ceremony. The top two teams were mentioned and celebrated. Position one was awarded to COBRA: commutator algebra for efficient excited-state calculation. The project can be seen here:
After the awards; networking session with music and traditional south African dishes was activated. Throughout the camp, I met different people from different parts of the world. It was fulfilling to see Abraham Asfaw who runs Qiskit coding tutorials on youtube. I met different IBMers who are responsible of the IBMQ Hardware. I was inspired to pursue quantum computing. The filed is still young and it requires a committed community of individuals from different academic and professional backgrounds to make significant momentum.
What next after Qiskit Camp Africa
Since I am the Chairman of the University of Cape Town Developers society, I made it intentional to seek contact with the lecturers who facilitated Wits Quantum Computing summer school so that I could invite them to give talks to our members. I will also share my experience with students to inspire them about the field of quantum computing. I have also made it intentional to follow Qiskit on medium to follow any updates on Qiskit development and events on Quantum computing. You can also follow Qiskit here:
I am also keen to pursue graduate studies in Quantum computing. I will be finishing my BSc( Hons) in Computer science in 2020, and am hoping to proceed to masters in Quantum computing.
Richard Feynman said, “If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don’t understand quantum mechanics”. I believe through learning and being passionate, I will become a Quantum computing expert.
To get you started with quantum computing; check here
Author: Willie Macharia, Bsc(Hons) candidate Computer Science at the University of Cape Town.
