Also in this quarter the 15 PlanQK consortium partners used virtual conference rooms to hold the regular consortium meeting. After the positive experience in May, the number of breakout sessions was increased again to allow for detailed discussions.
Bild 1: PlanQK consortium meeting in August 2020
In line with the overall project planning, the requirements analysis was completed in June 2020, thus creating a detailed catalog of requirements that defines the needs of the different user groups for the PlanQK platform. These requirements were presented and are now the basis for further development work on the platform and use cases. As a further insight from the completed requirements analysis, the different use cases were uniformly summarized in order to discuss the versatility of the applicability of quantum-supported artificial intelligence with third parties. In addition to this excellent progress, the work in the other working complexes was also discussed together. Here, too, progress was made according to plan; in particular, first demonstrations of use case applications were particularly well received by the entire consortium.
The first two breakout sessions took place in the afternoon: In one breakout session, the team from the University of Stuttgart and StoneOne presented a first version of the platform to demonstrate important aspects such as functionality, customer journey and user experience. Furthermore, the goal of this session went beyond the mere presentation, but also aimed at soliciting feedback for improvement from the consortium to further enhance data models and design. The extensive feedback once again proved the advantage of the different backgrounds of the many consortium partners. In the other breakout session the consortium-internal use of quantum computer simulators was discussed.
On Friday morning the morning was used for additional parallel breakout sessions. Techniques were discussed to account for the inherent instability of today’s quantum computers (‘NISQ era’) in the development of applications for quantum-assisted artificial intelligence. Furthermore, the current state of research of quantum algorithms was discussed in detail to enable their use in use cases.