“Técnico students are constantly surprising us with their amazing achievements”, says Yasser Omar, Técnico professor and coordinator of the Physics of Information and Quantum Technologies Group – Instituto de Telecomunicações (IT). The Técnico students Diogo Soares, Pedro Ramos and Miguel Bastos won the Quantum Information for Developers (QuID 2019), held at ETH Zurich.
“After I entered Information Systems and Computer Engineering course, I started to talk with my colleague Pedro Ramos about quantum computing and then one day he discovered the ETH Zurich website, which provided us a lot of contents on this subject”, says Diogo Soares. The two students began to attend virtual classes and “after many difficulties and a lot of research”, they were able to “acquire solid knowledge about the subject”, recalls Diogo Soares. Miguel Bastos was influenced by the interest of his two friends. “When we started learning about this subject, Miguel became interested too, so when we heard about the competition we decided to participate”, shares Diogo Soares.
Viktor Fukala, student from the Czech Republic, joined the Técnico team, and the four students competed together against 12 teams from around the world. According to Diogo Soares, the main challenges were: “the few content available using Google Cirq and the short time available”.
“Quantum Computing is a disruptive technology, with great potential for areas such as Cryptography, Chemistry, Finance and Artificial Intelligence. We are very curious so we can’t resist the temptation to understand this new world”, says Diogo Soares. “Quantum Computing is the next logical step of humankind so it will become increasingly attractive at financial level”, he adds. “We have never learnt anything as difficult as quantum computing fundamentals and how quantum algorithms work, so I would say it is very attractive and challenging to learn and work with quantum systems”, says Diogo Soares on behalf of the team.
The “positive influence of professor Yasser and his Quantum Computing group has been crucial to us”, stresses Diogo Soares, “particularly during the event “Encontro da Ciência”, where we had the opportunity to hear him speak about quantum computing and where we also had the privilege to see the first experiment of wireless quantum communications in Portugal carried out at IT”, recalls Diogo.
