EE Professor June-Koo (Kevin) Rhee’s Team Wins First Place at the QHack
2022 Open Hackathon Science Challenge.
[Picture of KAIST member, Ju-young Ryu (Master), Jeung-rak Lee (Master), Eyuel Elala (Master), and Prof. June-Koo Rhee, from left]
The research team of 3 master students in Prof. June-Koo Rhee’s group
(Ju-young Ryu, Jeung-rak Lee, and Eyuel Elala) at the KAIST ITRC of Quantum
Computing for AI has won the first place at the QHack 2022 Open Hackathon
Science Challenge.
QHack 2022 Open Hackathon is one of world’s greatest quantum software
hackathon event held by US Xanadu, in which 250 people from 100 countries
around the world have participated. Various sponsors such as IBM Quantum,
AWS, CERN QTI, and Google Quantum AI have proposed challenge problems, and a
winning team is selected judging from team projects in each challenge. Out
of the 13 challenges, the team supervised by Professor Rhee has received the
First Place prize on the Science Challenge which was organized by the CERN
QTI of the European Communities. The team is awarded an opportunity to tour
CERN research lab in Europe for a week along with an online internship.
The students in the team have presented a method for “Learning Based
Error Mitigation for VQE”, in which they have implemented an LBEM protocol
to lower the error in quantum computing, and leveraged the protocol in the
VQE algorithm which is used to calculate the ground state energy of a given
molecule.
Their research has successfully demonstrated the ability to effectively
mitigate the error in the IBM Quantum hardware and the virtual error model.
In conjunction, Professor June-Koo (Kevin) Rhee has found a quantum
computing venture start-up, Qunova Computing (https://qunovacomputing.com),
with technology tranfer from the KAIST ITRC of Quantum Computing for AI.
Qunova Computing is one of the frontier of the quantum SW industry in Korea.
