Quantum technologies are increasingly exiting basic research labs and entering industrial research and development pipelines. Airbus is actively investigating the potential business value of quantum technologies. In this talk, I will expose Airbus' business perspective on quantum computing, including the company's main drivers, its first moves in the space, and its global open-innovation activity on quantum computing: the Airbus Quantum Computing Challenge.

Quantum computing promises to bring great hope and change to our world. From previously unsolvable complex business problems to energy consumption and the end of Moore's law, it's time for us to start thinking about what's next in computational power - quantum computing. And yet, there is much hype and hyperbole about quantum computing. Join Chief Processor Architect Paul Bunyk for an exploration of the weirdness of quantum properties and how D-Wave has harnessed these using quantum mechanics to bring a new computing paradigm to market, all the while focusing on delivering real customer value – what we call practical quantum computing. Attendees will walk away with a new perspective on quantum computing and appreciation of the effort it took to develop revolutionary technology over twenty-years timespan, from the earliest prototypes to computing systems comparable to or beating modern classical computers.
In addition to learning more about the breadth of early applications, in industries as diverse as manufacturing, finance, healthcare and media, attendees leave with a new understanding of the types of questions they need to ask themselves as they think ahead to prepare for a quantum computing future.

Quantum computers are so radically different than classical computers, that we should not expect them to look at all like current computers or even be built from solid-state components. For example, trapped atomic ions are the most advanced and capable platform for building quantum computers. Ion trap systems feature perfect atomic clock qubits that are fully-connected through reconfigurable entangling gates defined by external laser fields. With these scaling prerequisites in hand, the challenge is now to use exploit laser pulse-shaping, atomic shutting and photonic interconnects to create large modular quantum information processors that will be able to tackle problems that can never be solved using classical computers. The good news is that these challenges do not require any breakthroughs and are entirely engineering in nature.

Colliding megatrends become more real everyday. From rapid urbanisation to technological breakthroughs like Quantum Computing, these all have an impact on business and society. For businesses, the question isn't if they will feel the impact, it's when. How do businesses manage the risks and unlock the opportunities of disruption?

Quantum computing technologies have steadily matured in laboratories around the world. We are now entering an exciting period. Quantum processors are about to dramatically exceed even the fastest supercomputers on benchmark tasks. In this talk I will describe our quest to demonstrate quantum supremacy using a processor with superconducting qubits. I will describe the roadmap for applications we hope to implement on these devices. In particular, I will discuss applications in optimization, machine learning, as well as in computational materials research.