Keynote Speaker

Matthias-Troyer-466x466-c

Hope Versus Hype: Quantum, AI and the Path to Commercial Advantage

Matthias Troyer

Microsoft |Technical Fellow and Corporate Vice President

KEY03 — Tuesday, September 17, 2024 @ 8:00–9:30 Eastern Time (EST) — UTC-4

 

Biography

Dr. Matthias Troyer is a Technical Fellow and Corporate Vice President at Microsoft, working on the system architecture of quantum computers and their applications.

After receiving his PhD in 1994 from ETH Zurich in Switzerland and spending time as a postdoc at the University of Tokyo, he was a professor of Computational Physics at ETH Zurich until joining Microsoft in 2017.

Matthias is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and President of the Aspen Center for Physics. He is a recipient of the Rahman Prize for Computational Physics of the American Physical Society “for pioneering numerical work in many seemingly intractable areas of quantum many-body physics and for providing efficient sophisticated computer codes to the community” and of the Hamburg Prize for Theoretical Physics.

Abstract

The promise of quantum is real, and we are beginning to see where this technology can have the greatest impact. Decades of quantum research and development point to one primary class of practical application for quantum computing next to cryptanalysis: the simulation of quantum systems, especially for chemistry and materials science. As we continue to improve the fidelity and scale of quantum machines, we will first be able to unlock scientific quantum advantage, solving a growing class of scientifically interesting and classically intractable problems. As we scale to quantum supercomputers, we will be able to achieve commercial quantum advantage and solve the world’s most pressing challenges through quantum-enabled advances in chemistry, biochemistry, and materials science . Yet scaled quantum systems won’t exist in isolation but will operate alongside AI and classical supercomputing. At Microsoft, we are today engineering these hybrid classical-quantum supercomputing systems with Azure Quantum Elements with the goal of accelerating scientific discovery. Join us to learn more about the promising applications for quantum computing, our latest achievements, and our path to scale.