Quantum, AI Come Together for Good

Quantum and AI are coming together in new ways to solve humanity’s biggest problems, according to a panel organized by the Lord Mayor of London at the recent City Quantum & AI Summit.

The first benefit came tempered with a warning. Quantum computing risks breaking the current encryption that keeps data secure, but it also offers an opportunity to introduce more secure and agile cryptography, according to Steve Suarez, founder and CEO of HorizonX.

Cryptography Risks and Benefits

Setting the scene, Suarez said some organizations are not prioritizing post-quantum cryptography (PQC) as experts give quantum computers only a 3% chance of breaking RSA, the public key encryption in wide use for securing data. However, the chances of a pandemic in 2020 were only 1.5%, which is why global governments are addressing it urgently.

“I know there's a lot of people in here that work with the U.S. Government,” Suarez said. “The White House put out an executive order saying that any money that wants to sell to or work with the government will be required to do PQC compliance.”

He added that after NIST recently released the official PQC algorithms, other countries are set to follow suit, and some of the biggest firms, including Apple and Zoom, have already embedded PQC algorithms in their technology.

Related:AI Drug Discovery Looks for Boost from Quantum

Suarez urged the audience to learn about PQC and quantum key distribution and to be aware of the risks as well as the opportunities.

Government and Corporate Perspectives on Quantum and AI

Julia Sutcliffe, chief scientific advisor at the Department of Business and Trade (DBT), emphasized that a baseline of science and technology is now ready to supercharge new products and services.

“The new government has articulated five key missions around economic growth, clean energy, safe streets, opportunity and a National Health Service (NHS) fit for the future. Quantum can play a significant role in that,” Sutcliffe said.

Sutcliffe said the NHS has a huge database following the COVID-19 pandemic and is looking to utilize that through its AI laboratory. The Addenbrooke Hospital is also working with the lab to improve cancer treatment.

The U.K. government has established five specialist quantum hubs. Sutcliffe highlighted the Q-Biomed hub established between University College London and the University of Cambridge to harness quantum technology to improve early diagnosis and treatment of disease. Other research efforts are addressing new materials for storage battery technology.

Drug Discovery Opportunities

Related:UK Commits $129M for Quantum Research Hubs

Ala Alenazi, an investment manager at Kinnevik, discussed the challenges in drug discovery and the potential of AI and quantum computing to improve the process. She said that AI can help deliver safer drugs faster by adding operational efficiency to compress timelines to market.

AI alone cannot understand all the processes that occur in the body but quantum can help simulate and understand chemical and physical processes better as they operate at a quantum level. This helps researchers work out what goes wrong and to design better drugs. It can also contribute to creating materials to discover better ways of delivering drugs.

“We’re often asked, what’s next? How can we understand ourselves, truly, as humans? We have multiple dimensions and levels of reactions,” Alenazi said.

She added that quantum could help understand an individual’s chemical and biological makeup, creating a digital twin to make treatments better, safer and faster.

Quantum for Pharma

Picking up the topic of modeling human biology, Hans Henrik Knudsen, co-founder and CEO at Kvantify, a company that develops pharmaceutical software, spoke about the company’s work simulating nature using quantum computers with classical computers to find new cures.

“It’s going to be a partnership between normal computers and quantum computers, and at that intersection, we focus on simulating the effects between drugs and bodies. That is hugely valuable because if you can make a difference here, there's no more interesting chemical reactions.”

Knudsen explained how quantum can improve on AI alone, as AI only finds patterns in existing data and does not “think outside the box.” Quantum can add that missing piece to finding cures for diseases that researchers have not studied before.

For example, AI could generate hundreds of thousands of candidate molecules, but quantum could analyze what effects these would have on the body.