Interview | Jennifer Houston, SVP Marketing & Public Affairs at DWave

Jennifer Houston, SVP Marketing and Public Affairs, shares her thoughts on the biggest challenges of Quantum technology in 2021 and gives top tips on how to best engage and support your business to adopt Quantum technologies. 

What was your favorite part of the Quantum.Tech digital event?

I’m always struck by the passion in this community. That was evident in robust conversation around the commercialization of quantum applications. It’s really rewarding to be able to provide a quantum platform that enables that today. At D-Wave, we get up in the morning and go to bed at night dreaming about helping customers build quantum hybrid applications using real data to solve real problems with real business impact. It was incredible to watch this industry and the number of quantum pioneers building these applications growing in such a vibrant and significant way. You could feel that throughout the event.

What do you think are the biggest challenges facing the adoption of Quantum technology in 2021?

The biggest misconception around quantum computing is that the practical applications are still years away. In reality, powerful hybrid quantum solvers, new developer tools, greater access, and continued professional networking are powering a thriving community of companies and developers that can leverage their quantum talents to impact business priorities today. In every new market there is always the early adopter curve, and we’re in it. But that’s really an opportunity, as it has allowed us to work with customers for the past 10 years and embed their incredible perspectives back into our products and services. This collaboration allows us to bring the next generation of developers and businesses the technologies for building quantum applications that have real-world, practical value.

For Solution Providers: Can you share an example of how your platform or application has been used by a new customer? Feel free to include any feedback or practical examples. We currently have more than 250 early apps in development with our partners, but one application in particular involves tackling the challenge of portfolio management. Managing a diverse investment portfolio of financial assets can often be a balancing act considering the number of possible configurations when transactions are performed every month for years. It’s the exact kind of complex problem that quantum computing does so well at solving.

Multiverse Computing is a leader in developing quantum computing-based solutions for the financial sector. Using the D-Wave hybrid solver service, which combines the strengths of classical and quantum computing, the company was able to develop an algorithmic approach that rapidly generates portfolios that can be optimized against a variety of constraints. Multiverse’s team recently worked with Bankia to maximize returns on a portfolio for a given risk. They used D-Wave’s hybrid solver to efficiently generate near-optimal portfolios (60% return at 15% volatility). Additionally, in their collaboration with BBVA, Multiverse set out to demonstrate that they could identify management strategies that yield the highest Sharpe ratio—a metric reflecting the rate of return at a given level of risk. This entailed using an algorithmic solver to find the optimal solution to a cost function equation that describes the risk, return, and transaction costs associated with a given portfolio. When used on an extra large dataset, comprising 10^ 382 possible portfolios, it only took D-Wave’s system 171 seconds to identify a portfolio with a Sharpe ratio of 12.16. To put that in perspective, Multiverse CTO Sam Mugel has noted that a ratio of eight is typically considered to be “a virtually risk-free investment.”

Top tips: How can you best engage and support the business to adopt Quantum technologies?

Start now. According to a recent survey 81% of Fortune 1000 decision-makers have a quantum computing use-case in mind for the next three years. Start thinking about which use cases are most complex or have been abandoned because of complexity, a challenge that 31% of business leaders had noted as a significant issue according to the same survey. Begin to sketch out your quantum strategy. Quantum computing is an entirely new paradigm that will require curious individuals and organizations to ask questions and push the boundaries of what’s possible. Businesses and developers can start learning, testing, and coding on a quantum computer today. It’s our job as the technology community to remove complexity and provide usable benchmarks and frameworks to encourage cross-platform comparisons. This in turn will expand learning and usage, moving the community from theoretical debates to practical quantum application development. Whether on D-Wave’s cloud service Leap, or other quantum platforms, the pace of change requires action and information.

Top tips: What is the best single piece of advice you can give to an enterprise looking to start their Quantum journey?

You have an application or use case that could benefit from quantum computing today. Our enterprise customers typically come to the table knowing that quantum computing could potentially have an impact on one or more business problems. However, while we’ve made it easier and easier for customers to get started with quantum, we often still have to help companies think differently. It’s why we started our formal, four-phased D-Wave Launch program, a jump-start program for businesses who want to get started building hybrid quantum applications today but may need additional support. We continue to be committed to making the systems, software and services as easy as possible, but I’ve really learned how much support businesses are asking for to help them get started in quantum.

Collaboration typically proceeds in four phases:

1.  help discover which business challenges are best suited for D-Wave’s hybrid quantum service,
2.  work with the customer team to build a proof-of-concept,
3.  pilot the hybrid quantum application, and
4.  put the hybrid quantum application into production. D-Wave Launch helps businesses identify and address relevant business problems using quantum computing, today. Our quantum computers support a broad array of use cases in industries including medicine, transportation, logistics, machine learning, and beyond. To derive business benefit from quantum computers, we help users identify the right problems, often in the form of optimization problems, and then help them map those problems onto the quantum processor.

If you look 5 years into the future, what do you consider will be the biggest impact Quantum technology will have on your industry?

Speaking as a provider, I believe healthcare is one industry that will benefit tremendously from quantum computing technology. Both today and over the next 5 years. We’re bullish on this because we’ve already seen amazing use cases emerge. Last year, D-Wave opened up a free quantum initiative for COVID-related research, during which we made our quantum computers available for free for anyone working on COVID-related research and development. Dozens of international partners (including DENSO, KYOCERA, NEC, Volkswagen, Menten-AI) joined to offer expertise and support with the simple goal to accelerate and support pandemic-related research with free access to quantum resources.

A year later, the applications that came out of this initiative point to quantum's ability to address major inefficiencies in healthcare — like disease hotspot prediction to vaccine distribution — all of which are still relevant in a "post-pandemic" world. One specific example is Sigma-i’s work (they're a company affiliated with Tohoku University in Japan) to optimize hospital resource allocation and nurse scheduling. They were able to build an application using quantum hybrid approaches that would optimize transportation and accommodation of 100,000 patients to medical facilities. Another example is U.S. start-up Menten AI’s work developing the first process using hybrid quantum programs to determine protein structure for de novo protein design. Their unique protein designs have been computationally validated, chemically synthesized, and advanced to live-virus testing against COVID-19. Healthcare, finance, logistics, retail, etc. Quantum has the power to disrupt them all. It’s a exciting time to be in quantum computing.