Spotlight – IBM

January 24, 2022

By Mark Ritter, C2QA Steering Committee & Chairman, XCITe.

In September 2021, IBM joined C2QA as the Center’s first industrial partner. The depth of their bench is strong, and we expect good things from this collaboration. Meet some of the key scientists involved.

Photo of Mark Ritter, David McKay, Andrew Cross, Ali Javadi

Mark Ritter, David McKay, Andrew Cross, Ali Javadi

Mark Ritter is Chair of the Physical Sciences Council for the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center. He also sits on the board of the C2QA Steering Committee. Mark was recently appointed and serves as Chairman of the C2QA XCITe team, where he will work to coordinate Center activities to achieve the 10-10-10 goal.

David McKay is the Lead C2QA Principal Investigator for the IBM team. Dave is a research staff member and manager at IBM Quantum, where he has been since 2015. His focus included two-qubit gate development for superconducting qubit devices and various topics in quantum characterization, calibration, and verification. He was involved in several aspects of IBM’s open-source quantum software project, Qiskit, including the development of the characterization package (Qiskit Ignis) and the language for full time-dependent control of qubits (Qiskit Pulse).

Andrew Cross is a C2QA Principal Investigator and sub-thrust leader for Quantum Error Correction. Andrew leads a team at the forefront of error correction research. His team works on fundamental research on the theory of quantum codes and fault-tolerant architectures, hardware efficient error correction, and software and simulation methods for error correction and noise.

Ali Javadi is a C2QA Principal Investigator and sub-thrust leader for Quantum Devices. Ali’s team, along with IBM, brings their open-source software stack – Qiskit – to the Center and will continue compiler improvement through the Center and customization of the stack for Center hardware. The team is also focused on noise-aware compiling and high-level benchmarking of devices (e.g., using holistic benchmarks, such as quantum volume).

2022-19385  |  INT/EXT  |  Newsroom