Quantum technology is an exciting area of science that has the potential to revolutionize our world by making computers faster and more powerful than ever before. It is widely applied in finance, healthcare, transport, and security.
Countries like the United States and China are ahead of the curve and closing on the quantum advantage. Google, IBM, and Microsoft have made tremendous strides and developed some of the most powerful quantum computers and software, some of which are accessible via the cloud.
Amid these notable preparations, many countries are missing out on the conversation about quantum computing, especially African countries, even though they face challenges in sectors like power, healthcare, agriculture, and financial optimization, and quantum technology can provide sustainable solutions.Â
To that effect, a Quantum Africa conference has been conducted annually since 2010, the first three in South Africa and the others in Algeria and Morocco, to promote collaboration on the subject.
This article analyzes the present position of quantum computing in Africa, focusing on educational programs, academic research, and industry adoption, mainly in South Africa.
IBM And Africa’s Quantum Computing Space
In June 2019, IBM Quantum announced a collaboration with the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits University) in South Africa to expand its quantum computing activities to Africa.
The tech giants also established a research Laboratory in Johannesburg in 2015, which allows African researchers to leverage IBM computer’s capacity. The laboratory was founded in 2015 as part of a 10-year investment plan spearheaded by the South African government’s Department of Trade and Industry. It provides a gateway to the IBM Quantum Experience, a cloud-based quantum computing platform available to African institutions that are members of ARUA.
IBM Research and Wits University researchers and activists have collaborated to create the IBM Quantum Challenge Africa, which was first held in 2021. The challenge aims to grow the African quantum community and boost participants’ quantum computing skills by guiding them through the application of quantum to problems in agriculture, finance, and chemistry.
Challenge creators such as Abbas and Akhalwaya have worked hard to ensure that the Quantum Challenge Africa activities are intellectually engaging for those with no prior foundation in quantum computing.
Qiskit Camp
IBM Research conducted the Qiskit Camp Africa hackathon in South Africa in 2019, attracting participants from around the continent. The 2020 Qiskit Global Summer School had 285 participants from 26 different African nations, while the 2021 event had 288 participants from 30 different African countries.
Notably, several participants worked on significant quantum computing challenges not only because classical computers struggle to address them but also because European quantum companies overlook them.
University Of The Witwatersrand
In 2018, the University of the Witwatersrand joined IBM’s Quantum Computing Network and have cloud access to IBM’s 50-qubit quantum computer. They became the first African academic partner in the IBM Quantum Network and a portal for academic cooperation throughout South Africa with 15 other African Research Universities Alliance universities (ARUA) like Addis Ababa University, the University of Nairobi, and the University of Lagos.
Under the supervision of professors Ken Nixon and Krupa Prag, students at Wits are tackling South Africa’s challenges, many of which relate to the optimal use of resources as part of the recently authorized “WitsQ: The Wits Quantum Initiative.”
Wits University secured R8 million seed funding from the Department of Science and Innovation (DSI) to implement phase one of the South African Quantum Technology Initiative (SA QuTI), a consortium of five universities: Wits University, Stellenbosch University, the University of KwaZulu-Natal, University of Zululand and Cape Peninsula University of Technology.
The institution offers an honors-level module titled “Full Stack Quantum Computing” to support its expanding research into the application of quantum computing. The module uses the open-source SDK, Qiskit, and the IBM Quantum Composer and Lab tools to provide software engineering students with a good foundation in quantum technology.
Stellenbosch University
Also pushing for the quantum advantage in South Africa is Stellenbosch University in Cape Town. At the forefront of their research is Prof. Mark Tame.
Unathi Skosana and Conrad Strydom, Tame’s students, are researching on small-scale quantum algorithms to understand better the limitations of quantum bits or qubits owing to noise and defects.
Prof. Tame thinks this work may offer some answers regarding the processor performance required for scaling up algorithms for eventual applications in quantum chemistry for TB and HIV medication development.
In another research, his student Hjalmar Rall is generating quantum resources (entangled states) and performs quantum operations important for quantum networking protocols through IBM Quantum processors in the cloud. He believes this might aid in developing South Africa’s future quantum communication infrastructure.
The university has also developed the first radio-frequency trapped ion in Africa. Radio frequency ion traps are devices that can trap clouds of thousands of ionized atoms, a few ions at a time, or even a single ion. Some traps may maintain the same ion trapped for weeks under optimal conditions. They achieved this using the Ytterbium atoms.
Quantum Research Group In University Of Kwazulu-Natal
The University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban, South Africa, has been researching quantum machine learning since 2014 under Prof. Francesco Petruccione, head of the Quantum Research Group. In 2017, a team of researchers from the institution began performing tests on IBM’s five-qubit computer, which resulted in a report on a “minimalistic” distance-based classifier built using a quantum interference circuit.
Their early experiments with machine learning methods on quantum computers resulted in the publication of the book Supervised Learning with Quantum Computers, co-authored by Maria Schuld. Maria works at the University of KwaZulu-Big Natal’s Data and Informatics Flagship, where she got her PhD in theoretical physics in 2017.
The book provides an introduction to the field of quantum machine learning research. It discusses various theoretical and practical methods for understanding how quantum computers can learn from data, including “near-term” quantum machine learning algorithms and fault-tolerant quantum machine learning algorithms.
Prof. Petruccione and Prof. Ilya Sinayskiy’s students Ian David and Shivani Pillay have used IBM’s computer to further their understanding of open quantum systems by assessing current noisy hardware for kernel estimation in quantum machine learning applications.
David used IBM QPUs to run a digital quantum simulation of convex mixing of quantum channels, seeing a shift between Markovian and non-Markovian dynamics of the resultant quantum channel. Shivani used IBM’s computer to estimate Gram’s matrix for a few common non-linearly separable datasets after a spike of interest in using QPUs for quantum kernel estimation.
Blacks In Quantum
Black in Quantum is a network to connect Black leaders in quantum science. The group was formed by Gideon Uchehara, a Nigerian and Ph.D. student in the NSERC CREATE Program in Quantum Computing. He believes there may have been opportunities to explore quantum science and technology, but he wasn’t aware of them. Black in quantum is meant to make the opportunities he wished he had more available to Black scholars.
Uchehara is pursuing a Ph.D. in quantum machine learning at the University of British Columbia after completing a Master’s degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering at McGill University.Â
Africa rises to the Quantum Challenge
Though Africa is behind in the race for the quantum advantage, they’re gradually rising. Its development from university research to commercial markets is inevitable. The African continent has a responsibility, however, to produce more scientists that can contribute to the development of this field by investing in research institutions.