IIT Madras hosts International Conference on Quantum Communication, Measurement & Computing (QCMC24) for the first time in India

“Within the next three months, we will be handing grants to 10 to 15 good start-ups. We want to see them grow, scale and go global:” Dr. Ajai Chowdhury, Chairman, Mission Governing Board, National Quantum Mission

CHENNAI: Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IIT Madras) is hosting the International Conference on Quantum Communication, Measurement & Computing (QCMC 2024) from 26th to 30th August 2024. This is the 16th Edition of the Conference and the very first one to be held in India.

The Center For Quantum Information, Communication And Computing (CQuICC), a Centre of Excellence at IIT Madras, is coordinating the event. It is being held at the IIT Madras Research Park.

Established in 1990, the QCMC is one of the most prestigious global forums for scientists and engineers in the interdisciplinary field of quantum information science and technology. It brings together experts from across the world to share advancements in quantum computing, quantum communication, quantum cryptography, and quantum sensing. The conference is sponsored by IIT Madras, Mphasis F1 Foundation and KLA.

Delivering an address on ‘India’s National Quantum Mission’ during the inaugural session today (26th Aug 2024), Dr. Ajai Chowdhury, Chairman, Mission Governing Board, National Quantum Mission, said, “It is great that IIT Madras managed to get the conference to India. Tremendous amount of work is already going on in India, especially in IIT Madras where a lot of work was underway. As a plan that was done by DST, where the National Quantum Mission is housed, we started working on many projects including of the Ministry of Electronics and IT and other Ministries. As we started to work on the National Quantum Mission, we started to look how many scientists and PIs are working in this field and found that India had around 600 scientists and 40 to 50 start-ups as well in Quantum Technology.”

Further, Dr. Ajai Chowdhury said, “We are clearly working on making sure that all parts of quantum technologies are taken care off. After the National Quantum Mission launch, we had an overwhelming response with close to 385 proposals received to set up thematic parks and other areas of the quantum technologies. At this moment, we have finalized where we want to go and soon, the National Quantum Mission will be making the announcements. The plan is to set up four independent Section 08 Companies in which the thematic parks will be housed – Computing, Communications, Sensing and Materials. The whole objective is that we bring together all researchers under on thematic hub. addition, we felt that we must involve start-ups in a big way. We wrote to about 40-odd start-ups and we met about 14 start-ups to understand where we are.”

Dr. Ajai Chowdhury added, “Within the next three months, we will be handing grants to 10 to 15 good start-ups. We want to see them grow, scale and go global. There have been some good products developed, especially in cryptography. We have also been working to get various software companies to get involved, and encourage them to invest in quantum. Again, we were surprised to see that some were already working in quantum. We want them to actually take products from India that have already been developed and take them globally because they have the reach required for it.”

IIT Madras has positioned itself as a leader in quantum research through the establishment of the Center for Quantum Information, Communication, and Computing (CQuICC). The Institute is advancing India’s quantum frontier with cutting-edge research in quantum cryptography, quantum sensing, quantum information theory and quantum networks. The institution also plays a crucial role in India’s National Quantum Mission, contributing to the development of home-grown quantum technologies.

Speaking earlier, Prof. V. Kamakoti, Director, IIT Madras, said, “I am happy and excited that this Quantum Conference has come to India for the first time. We have large scale data and problems that we were try to solve in the classical computing era, in areas ranging from hardware to logistics and networking problems. Many of these problems are extremely complex and we were trying to solve using heuristics. We have reached a stage where due to enormous size of the data and the problem, the heuristics are no longer optimal and our approximation methodologies will also fail due to the enormity of the problem size.”

Further, Prof. V. Kamakoti added, “This is precisely why we started looking into quantum technologies, which can help us to scale and speed up the heuristics to get solutions in a time-constrained manner. I hope these deliberations will lead to interesting directors in which all of us can proceed.”

Delivering the Opening Remarks, Prof. Mete Atature, Chair, Steering Committee, QCMC 2024, University of Cambridge, UK, said, “This conference has a tradition of bringing together not just mathematicians but also engineers, researchers and other stakeholders and break boundaries. We have talks in cutting-edge areas in Quantum technologies. The breadth of this conference is quite broad and is designed to tackle interesting questions and challenges. This conference is the oldest quantum conference established in 1990 in Paris, held every two years except 2020 due to the pandemic…It is high time this conference came to India especially in view of the National Quantum Mission. Representatives from 16 countries are taking part in the conference.”

Prof. Raghunathan Rengaswamy, Dean (Global Engagement), IIT Madras, released the CQuICC Newsletter during the Inaugural session. Prof. Prabha Mandayam, Local Organizing Committee, CQuICC, IIT Madras, spoke. Prof. Mark Wilde, Cornell University, delivered the Opening Plenary Talk on ‘Exact solutions for the fundamental limits of communication, discrimination, and estimation of bosonic dephasing channels’.

The QCMC 2024 aims to:

Ø  Facilitate cross-disciplinary collaboration between physicists, computer scientists, and engineers in the quantum field.

Ø  Accelerate the translation of quantum research into practical applications, particularly in the fields of secure communication and advanced computing.

Ø  Foster international partnerships to address global challenges in quantum technology, thus contributing to the development of a global quantum ecosystem.

QCMC 2024 conference will feature discussions on a broad spectrum of topics from foundational quantum theory to cutting-edge quantum technology applications. The conference highlights include 18 invited talks from Top Global Experts and leaders in quantum science and technologies, including Prof. Andreas Walraff (ETH Zurich), Prof. Mark Wilde (Cornell University), Prof. Urbasi Sinha (Raman Research Institute) and Prof. Karol Zyczkowski (Polish Academy of Sciences).

Special Industry-Academia sessions have also been scheduled to foster collaboration between quantum startups and established industry players.

The Conference will include 20 contributed talks and over 100 poster presentations by early-career researchers covering the latest innovations in quantum computing and communication.