Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras is hosting the International Conference on Quantum Communication, Measurement & Computing (QCMC 2024) from Monday, August 26, 2024. The conference will be held for five days till August 30, 2024. The event is being held at the IIT Madras Research Park.
Notably, this is the 16th Edition of the conference but the maiden edition to be held in India.
The event is being coordinated by the Center for Quantum Information, Communication and Computing (CQuICC), a Center of Excellence at IIT Madras.
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A press release informed that the QCMC is one of the most prestigious global forums for scientists and engineers in the interdisciplinary field of quantum information science and technology.
The conference was established in 1990 and brings together global experts who share advancements in quantum computing, quantum communication, quantum cryptography, and quantum sensing.
It will feature discussions on a broad range of topics including foundational quantum theory to cutting-edge quantum technology applications. The conference will also highlight 18 invited talks from top global experts and leaders in quantum science and technologies, including Prof. Andreas Walraff (ETH Zurich), Prof. Mark Wilde (Cornell University), Prof. Urbasi Sinha (Raman Research Institute) and Prof. Karol Zyczkowski (Polish Academy of Sciences).
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Additionally, the conference will also include 20 contributed talks and over 100 poster presentations by early-career researchers covering the latest innovations in quantum computing and communication.
The conference is sponsored by IIT Madras, Mphasis F1 Foundation, and KLA.
Dr. Ajai Chowdhury, Chairman of the Mission Governing Board, National Quantum Mission, delivered an address on 'India's National Quantum Mission' during the inaugural session on Monday.
He said, “It is great that IIT Madras managed to get the conference to India. A tremendous amount of work is already going on in India, especially at IIT Madras where a lot of work is underway. As a plan that was done by DST, where the National Quantum Mission is housed, we started working on many projects including those of the Ministry of Electronics and IT and other Ministries. As we started to work on the National Quantum Mission, we started to look at how many scientists and PIs are working in this field and found that India had around 600 scientists and 40 to 50 start-ups as well in Quantum Technology.”
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Dr Chowdhury informed that work is being done to ensure all parts of quantum technologies are taken care of. “After the National Quantum Mission launch, we had an overwhelming response with close to 385 proposals received to set up thematic parks and other areas of the quantum technologies. At this moment, we have finalized where we want to go and soon, the National Quantum Mission will be making the announcements. The plan is to set up four independent Section 08 Companies in which the thematic parks will be housed – Computing, Communications, Sensing and Materials,” he added.
“We wrote to about 40-odd start-ups and we met about 14 start-ups to understand where we are,” Dr Chawdhury said.
He further highlighted that in the next three months, grants will be handed to 10 to 15 good start-ups, adding that the plan is to watch them grow, scale, and go global.
Prof. V. Kamakoti, Director of IIT Madras, also shared his delight on Quantum Conference being held in India for the first time. “We have large-scale data and problems that we were trying to solve in the classical computing era, in areas ranging from hardware to logistics and networking problems. Many of these problems are extremely complex and we were trying to solve them using heuristics. We have reached a stage where due to the enormous size of the data and the problem, the heuristics are no longer optimal and our approximation methodologies will also fail due to the enormousness of the problem size,” Prof Kamakoti informed.
He added that this was precisely why IIT Madras started looking into quantum technologies, which can help to scale and speed up the heuristics to get solutions in a time-constrained manner.
Prof. Mete Atature, Chair of the Steering Committee, QCMC 2024, University of Cambridge, UK, highlighted that the conference has a tradition of bringing together not just mathematicians but also engineers, researchers, and other stakeholders and breaking boundaries.
“We have talks in cutting-edge areas in Quantum technologies. The breadth of this conference is quite broad and is designed to tackle interesting questions and challenges. This conference is the oldest quantum conference established in 1990 in Paris, held every two years except in 2020 due to the pandemic. It is high time this conference came to India, especially in view of the National Quantum Mission. Representatives from 16 countries are taking part in the conference,” Prof Atature said.
Some of the objectives of the QCMC 2024 are as follows:
- Facilitate cross-disciplinary collaboration between physicists, computer scientists, and engineers in the quantum field.
- Accelerate the translation of quantum research into practical applications, particularly in the fields of secure communication and advanced computing.
- Foster international partnerships to address global challenges in quantum technology, thus contributing to the development of a global quantum ecosystem.
