Artificial Intelligence
D-Wave Announces General Availability of First Quantum Computer Built for Business
BURNABY, British Columbia, Sept. 29, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — D-Wave Systems Inc., the leader in quantum computing systems, software, and services, today announced the general availability of its next-generation quantum computing platform, incorporating new hardware, software, and tools to enable and accelerate the delivery of in-production quantum computing applications. Available today in the Leap™ quantum cloud service, the platform includes the Advantage™ quantum system, with more than 5000 qubits and 15-way qubit connectivity, in addition to an expanded hybrid solver service that can run problems with up to one million variables. The combination of the computing power of Advantage and the scale to address real-world problems with the hybrid solver service in Leap enables businesses to run performant, real-time, hybrid quantum applications for the first time.
As part of its commitment to enabling businesses to build in-production quantum applications, the company announced D-Wave Launch™, a jump-start program for businesses who want to get started building hybrid quantum applications today but may need additional support. Bringing together a team of applications experts and a robust partner community, the D-Wave Launch program provides support to help identify the best applications and to translate businesses’ problems into hybrid quantum applications. The extra support helps customers accelerate designing, building, and running their most important and complex applications, while delivering quantum acceleration and performance.
The company also announced a new hybrid solver. The discrete quadratic model (DQM) solver gives developers and businesses the ability to apply the benefits of hybrid quantum computing to new problem classes. Instead of accepting problems with only binary variables (0 or 1), the DQM solver uses other variable sets (e.g. integers from 1 to 500, or red, yellow, and blue), expanding the types of problems that can run on the quantum computer. The DQM solver will be generally available on October 8.
With support for new solvers and larger problem sizes backed by the Advantage system, customers and partners like Menten AI, Save-On-Foods, Accenture, and Volkswagen are building and running hybrid quantum applications that create solutions with business value today.
- Protein design pioneer Menten AI has developed the first process using hybrid quantum programs to determine protein structure for de novo protein design with very encouraging results often outperforming classical solvers. Menten AI’s unique protein designs have been computationally validated, chemically synthesized, and are being advanced to live-virus testing against COVID-19.
- Western Canadian grocery retailer Save-On-Foods is using hybrid quantum algorithms to bring grocery optimization solutions to their business, with pilot tests underway in-store. The company has been able to reduce the time an important optimization task takes from 25 hours to a mere 2 minutes of calculations each week. Even more important than the reduction in time is the ability to optimize performance across and between a significant number of business parameters in a way that is challenging using traditional methods.
- Accenture, a leading global professional services company, is exploring quantum, quantum-inspired, and hybrid solutions to develop applications across industries. Accenture recently conducted a series of business experiments with a banking client to pilot quantum applications for currency arbitrage, credit scoring, and trading optimization, successfully mapping computationally challenging business problems to quantum formulations, enabling quantum readiness.
- Volkswagen, an early adopter of D-Wave’s annealing quantum computer, has expanded its quantum use cases with the hybrid solver service to build a paint shop scheduling application. The algorithm is designed to optimize the order in which cars are being painted. By using the hybrid solver service, the number of color switches will be reduced significantly, leading to performance improvements.
The Advantage quantum computer and the Leap quantum cloud service include:
- New Topology: The topology in Advantage makes it the most connected of any commercial quantum system in the world. In the D-Wave 2000Q™ system, qubits may connect to 6 other qubits. In the new Advantage system, each qubit may connect to 15 other qubits. With two-and-a-half times more connectivity, Advantage enables the embedding of larger problems with fewer physical qubits compared to using the D-Wave 2000Q system. The D-Wave Ocean™ software development kit (SDK) includes tools for using the new topology. Information on the topology in Advantage can be found in this white paper, and a getting started video on how to use the new topology can be found here.
- Increased Qubit Count: With more than 5000 qubits, Advantage more than doubles the qubit count of the D-Wave 2000Q system. More qubits and richer connectivity provide quantum programmers access to a larger, denser, and more powerful graph for building commercial quantum applications.
- Greater Performance & Problem Size: With up to one million variables, the hybrid solver service in Leap allows businesses to run large-scale, business-critical problems. This, coupled with the new topology and more than 5000 qubits in the Advantage system, expands the complexity and more than doubles the size of problems that can run directly on the quantum processing unit (QPU). In fact, the hybrid solver outperformed or matched the best of 27 classical optimization solvers on 87% of 45 application-relevant inputs tested in MQLib. Additionally, greater connectivity of the QPU allows for more compact embeddings of complex problems. Advantage can find optimal solutions 10 to 30 times faster in some cases, and can find better quality solutions up to 64% percent of the time, when compared to the D-Wave 2000Q LN QPU.
- Expansion of Hybrid Software & Tools in Leap: Further investments in the hybrid solver service, new solver classes, ease-of-use, automation, and new tools provide an even more powerful hybrid rapid development environment in Python for business-scale problems.
- Flexible Access: Advantage, the expanded hybrid solver service, and the upcoming DQM solver are available in the Leap quantum cloud service. All current Leap customers get immediate access with no additional charge, and new customers will benefit from all the new and existing capabilities in Leap. This means that developers and businesses can get started today building in-production hybrid quantum applications. Flexible purchase plans allow developers and forward-thinking businesses to access the D-Wave quantum system in the way that works for them and their business.
- Ongoing Releases: D-Wave continues to bring innovations to market with additional hybrid solvers, QPUs, and software updates through the cloud. Interested users and customers can get started today with Advantage and the hybrid solver service, and will benefit from new components of the platform through Leap as they become available.
“Today’s general availability of Advantage delivers the first quantum system built specifically for business, and marks the expansion into production scale commercial applications and new problem types with our hybrid solver services. In combination with our new jump-start program to get customers started, this launch continues what we’ve known at D-Wave for a long time: it’s not about hype, it’s about scaling, and delivering systems that provide real business value on real business applications,” said Alan Baratz, CEO, D-Wave. “We also continue to invest in the science of building quantum systems. Advantage was completely re-engineered from the ground up. We’ll take what we’ve learned about connectivity and scale and continue to push the limits of innovation for the next generations of our quantum computers. I’m incredibly proud of the team that has brought us here and the customers and partners who have collaborated with us to build hundreds of early applications and who now are putting applications into production.”
“We are using quantum to design proteins today. Using hybrid quantum applications, we’re able to solve astronomical protein design problems that help us create new protein structures,” said Hans Melo, Co-founder and CEO, Menten AI. “We’ve seen extremely encouraging results with hybrid quantum procedures often finding better solutions than competing classical solvers for de novo protein design. This means we can create better proteins and ultimately enable new drug discoveries.”
“At Save-On-Foods, we have been committed to bringing innovation to our customers for more than 105 years. To that end, we are always looking for new and creative ways to solve problems, especially in an environment that has gotten increasingly complex,” said Andrew Donaher, Vice President, Digital & Analytics at Save-On-Foods. “We’re new to quantum computing, and in a short period of time, we have seen excellent early results. In fact, the early results we see with Advantage and the hybrid solver service from D-Wave are encouraging enough that our goal is to turn our pilot into an in-production business application. Quantum is emerging as a potential competitive edge for our business.”
“Accenture is committed to helping our clients prepare for the arrival of mainstream quantum computing by exploring relevant use cases and conducting business experiments now,” said Marc Carrel-Billiard, Senior Managing Director and Technology Innovation Lead at Accenture. “We’ve been collaborating with D-Wave for several years and with early access to the Advantage system and hybrid solver service we’ve seen performance improvements and advancements in the platform that are important steps for helping to make quantum a reality for clients across industries, creating new sources of competitive advantage.”
“Embracing quantum computing is nothing new for Volkswagen. We were the first to run a hybrid quantum application in production in Lisbon last November with our bus routing application,” said Florian Neukart, Director of Advanced Technologies at Volkswagen Group of America. “At Volkswagen, we are focusing on building up a deep understanding of meaningful applications of quantum computing in a corporate context. The D-Wave system gives us the opportunity to address optimization tasks with a large number of variables at an impressive speed. With this we are taking a step further towards quantum applications that will be suitable for everyday business use.”
About D-Wave Systems Inc.
D-Wave is the leader in the development and delivery of quantum computing systems, software and services and is the world’s first commercial supplier of quantum computers. Our mission is to unlock the power of quantum computing for the world. We do this by delivering customer value with practical quantum applications for problems as diverse as logistics, artificial intelligence, materials sciences, drug discovery, cybersecurity, fault detection, and financial modeling. D-Wave’s systems are being used by some of the world’s most advanced organizations, including NEC, Volkswagen, DENSO, Lockheed Martin, USRA, USC, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory. With headquarters near Vancouver, Canada, D-Wave’s US operations are based in Palo Alto, CA and Bellevue, WA. D-Wave has a blue-chip investor base including PSP Investments, Goldman Sachs, BDC Capital, NEC Corp., and In-Q-Tel. For more information, visit: www.dwavesys.com.
Contact
D-Wave Systems Inc.
[email protected]
Photos accompanying this announcement are available at
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Artificial Intelligence
Picus Security Launches Security Validation for Kubernetes
Teams can eliminate container security exposures with the new enhancements in Picus’ platform for multi-cloud
SAN FRANCISCO, May 23, 2024 /PRNewswire/ — Picus Security, the Security Validation company, today announced security validation for Kubernetes. This new capability allows Security and DevOps teams to realize the benefits of containers securely by proactively measuring and optimizing the resilience of clusters. It is the latest innovative addition to the Picus Security Validation Platform, which empowers users to consistently validate their security posture and measure risk across on-premises and multi-cloud environments.
For organizations that want an agile way to deploy, run and scale applications, Kubernetes offers considerable benefits. However, security is often the biggest barrier to its adoption. The dynamic and complex nature of Kubernetes means that containers are often misconfigured due to human error. Without a hands-on approach to governance, security gaps can easily emerge over time, increasing the risk of incidents. This situation is exacerbated by the high level of expertise required to secure Kubernetes and the use of default settings which are inherently insecure. According to The State of Kubernetes Report, more than two-thirds of Kubernetes users (67%) have delayed deployments due to security concerns.*
The addition of Kubernetes validation extends the Picus platform’s existing validation capabilities, which are powered by attack simulation and GenAI. It enables organizations to proactively identify and mitigate security misconfigurations, such as weak policies and settings that could allow containers to run with insecure privileges and facilitate lateral movement. Now security teams can automatically assess the security of their workloads wherever they are located – on-premises, in containers, and also in cloud platforms including Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure.
“Cloud security is perhaps the biggest barrier of entry for organizations that want to take advantage of container orchestration,” said Volkan Erturk, Picus CTO and Co-Founder. “Kubernetes offers incredible opportunities for DevOps teams to deploy and scale new applications, but Security teams can struggle to keep pace.
“With the Picus Security Validation Platform, security concerns won’t slow down an organization’s digital transformation journey. This new offering will allow our users to consistently measure the security of their workloads and vastly reduce the effort needed to address exposures across growing IT environments.”
Additional Information
Read the Kubernetes validation announcement blog.Register for the upcoming webinar on July 11th 2024 at 10.00 EST/ 15.00 BST: Beyond Cloud Security Posture Management: Validating Cloud Effectiveness with Attack Simulation About Picus Security
Picus Security helps security teams consistently and accurately validate their security posture. Our Security Validation Platform simulates real-world threats to evaluate the effectiveness of security controls, identify high-risk attack paths to critical assets, and optimize threat prevention and detection capabilities.
As the pioneer of Breach and Attack Simulation, we specialize in delivering the actionable insights our customers need to be threat-centric and proactive.
Picus is a Gartner® Peer Insights™ Customers’ Choice for 2024 in the BAS tools category†. The company is recognized as a leader by Frost & Sullivan^.
† Gartner, Voice of the Customer for Breach and Attack Simulation Tools, Peer Contributors, 30 January 2024 ^ Frost and Sullivan, 2022 Frost Radar™ report for the Global Breach and Attack Simulation Market
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Artificial Intelligence
Highlights from the Finale: Day Three of the London Blockchain Conference Unravelled
As the London Blockchain Conference draws to a close, attendees heard from industry experts on Driving Innovation with Blockchain.
LONDON, May 23, 2024 /PRNewswire/ — Attendees at the London Blockchain Conference were in to witness the final day, which featured a line-up of informative and thought-provoking speakers. Throughout the day, there were exciting panels and presentations which featured cutting-edge ideas and insights.
Day 3 kickstarted with BSVA launching a new report focusing on the role of blockchain in safeguarding data and streamlining transactions.
Other sessions included:
The Intersection of Web3, AI, and Emerging Tech – Somi Aran, Founder of InPeak gave the opening keynote which explored the dynamic convergence of Web3, Artificial Intelligence, and emerging technologies. She delved into how these technologies are reshaping industries and redefining the boundaries of innovation and the potential impacts and opportunities these technologies present.
Bridging the gap: Making Web3 technologies user-friendly – Christine Leong, CIO, nChain – discussed some of the innovative strategies and practical solutions aimed at simplifying Web3 technologies. She also discussed how nChain is planning to transform Web3 from a domain exclusive to the tech-savvy, into a user-friendly ecosystem that empowers all users.
Is code law? – Rules applicable to blockchain networks – panel featuring Marcin Zarakowski, CEO of Token Recovery, Akber Datoo CEO of D2 Legal Technology, Jeffrey Golden, King’s Counsel (Hon) at 3 Hare Court Chambers, Andrei Kirilenko, Professor of Finance at Cambridge Judge Business School, Professor Sarah Green, Law Commissioner at Law Commission, where they discussed that rules apply to the nodes and validators which support the particular network and process its transactions. The group also discussed whether the blockchain protocols’ rules and software code are the only sources of regulation in blockchain networks.
An Introduction to nChain Identity – Thomas Moretti, Head of Product Development at nChain. He spoke about the Self Sovereignty Identity concept and showcased the latest project it is working on – nChain Identity.
Reimagining Roles: How regulated industry leaders are shaping the future of finance – a panel featuring, Andrew Mosson (Chief Commercial Officer of OneTrading, Néstor Palao, Head DLT & Corporate Clients at Sygnum Bank, Laurence Lewandowska, CFO/COO at BSV Association and Wojciech Kaszycki Chairman & Founder at Mobilum. The panel discussed how the new era of digital assets, traditional banking institutions, exchanges, and financial services are being reimagined in the context of emerging technologies such as blockchain and AI.
Please register here if you would like to listen to any of the sessions today.
If you want to interview any speaker from today’s sessions, please email [email protected].
About the London Blockchain Conference NETWORK. LEARN. ENGAGE. At the London Blockchain Conference, we show how Blockchain will change the world and help people see another way to manage data, build scalable on-chain solutions and achieve great things. We do this by creating valuable, insightful, and engaging events that educate and inform, allowing you to connect and network to build strong business relationships. Our conference is the best avenue to see blockchain innovations, ecosystem announcements, product launches, technology updates, keynote speeches, panels, and fireside chats from blockchain leaders. Join us and experience it for yourself.
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Artificial Intelligence
Nord Anglia Education publishes new insights on the role of AI and metacognition in learning
LONDON, May 23, 2024 /PRNewswire/ — INSIGHTS, the global publication from Nord Anglia Education, has published two new articles taking an in-depth look at AI in education and the role of metacognition in teaching and learning.
Exploring the role of AI in learning
https://www.nordangliaeducation.com/insights/2024/articles/the-generative-generationIn its ‘Generative Generation’ feature, INSIGHTS explores the role of artificial intelligence (AI) in education, and whether the technology is making it easier for children to learn. Speaking to Nord Anglia’s educators as well as leading experts from the world of academia, it also includes real-life examples of how Nord Anglia’s schools are using AI in the classroom.
For example, Nord Anglia’s British International School in Kuala Lumpur has adapted the technology to create an AI-powered teaching assistant that can personalise learning, guide students through content exploration, and deepen their understanding through interactive activities. Learners define the topic they want to explore and the course specification they are working to, and the AI explores the content with them in a conversational way, enabling them to ask questions as they go.
Dr Bruce Geddes, Deputy Head of Secondary at the school, told INSIGHTS that AI represents “the biggest opportunity we’ve had in our lifetimes, for many, many spheres, but particularly in education”.
Avenues: The World School in New York, which became part of Nord Anglia in 2023, encourages its students to use AI in their work. As an example, in an app development project students use ChatGPT to generate the bulk of the coding, then review, correct and refine it. This saves them “hours of manual work by leveraging the appropriate tool in an academically appropriate way,” says Lia Muschellack, Director of Technology at the school.
The school also has its own generative AI chatbot, Savvy, built in 2019 and now powered by open AI technology. It can answer queries, provide information, and engage in “diverse discussions ranging from academic topics to casual conversations”.
“We understand that our students will be actively leveraging these tools throughout their academic and professional pathways, so we want to make sure they not only understand the potentials and limitations, but that they have tinkered and truly experienced them,” Muschellack explains.
Metacognition: a learning superpower
In its feature ‘Metacognition. Helping Kids Unlock the Power of ‘Thinking about Thinking’, INSIGHTS looks at how students can develop the important skill of metacognition.
“Metacognition is the ability to be aware of our cognitive or thought processes and to monitor, reflect on, and change those processes,” Dr Rose Luckin, Professor of Learner Centred Design at the University College London Knowledge Lab, told INSIGHTS.
Nord Anglia Education is working with Dr Luckin to develop its approach to metacognition and to help teachers introduce metacognitive strategies into classrooms. It has developed a metacognitive framework of six “Learner Ambitions” to help students develop the 6 Cs: to become critical, creative, committed, and curious learners, working compassionately and collaboratively in the classroom and beyond.
As the article explains, Nord Anglia’s deep dive into metacognition has many goals: developing student agency, boosting academic performance, and developing ‘future’ skills that employers want. The framework is being initially applied across 27 Nord Anglia schools around the world and its impact will be measured in independent research in partnership with Boston College, reporting in 2025.
Nord Anglia’s examination of metacognition also involves exploring personalised goals and thinking routines. For instance, students at Nord Anglia International School Hong Kong use the “Step In, Step Out, Step Back” routine to develop empathy and understanding in their studies. “It’s about asking the right questions; those really big questions that lead to even more questions,” says Raquel Thomson, the school’s Deputy Head of Primary. “Thinking strategies like this stay with students and serve a purpose whatever they do in their lives, whether they choose to be a scientist or a teacher or go into business.”
For media enquiries please contact: Francesca Milani Communications Manager, Digital Education Portfolio +44 20 7131 0000 [email protected]
About Nord Anglia Education:
As the world’s leading international schools organisation, we’re shaping a generation of creative and resilient global citizens who graduate from our schools with everything they need for success, whatever they choose to be or do in life.
Our strong academic foundations combine world-class teaching and curricula with cutting-edge technology and facilities, creating learning experiences like no other. Inside and outside of the classroom, we inspire our students to achieve more than they ever thought possible.
No two children learn the same way, which is why our schools around the world personalise learning to what works best for every student. Inspired by our high-quality teachers, our students achieve outstanding academic results and go on to study at the world’s top universities.
To learn more or apply for a place for your child, go to nordangliaeducation.com.
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View original content:https://www.prnewswire.co.uk/news-releases/nord-anglia-education-publishes-new-insights-on-the-role-of-ai-and-metacognition-in-learning-302154442.html
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