The QuantumMadness team from Big Data Analytics and Artificial Intelligence MMF NSU master program achieved prized place at the QHack.ai Hackathon 2021 first stage competition with 18th place among 385 committed teams worldwide.
The challenge for the first stage of the Hackathon consisted in solving 12 tasks related to the Quantum Machine Learning field with the usage of the open-source PennyLane library. The organizers are well-known researchers as Nathan Killoran and Maria Schuld, and photonic quantum computations company XanaduAI, Inc. Totally it was claimed participance of more then 894 teams for all the world. But only 385 teams were able to do at least one solution for the tasks.
NSU team was able to solve all the tasks. The second-year master students of BDA & AI program Raphael Blankson and Andrey Yashkin are now doing their master theses in the continuous-variable quantum machine learning circuits application to speech recognition tasks:
— It was challengeable to solve most of the tasks relevant to differentiable programming. We were forced to apply not only our basic machine learning knowledge, but recent Quantum Machine Learning course theory and practical programming skills, such as using decorators, — Raphael Blankson commenting the results of the challenge.
The prize for the first 80 teams is $250 each in Amazon Web Services credits for quantum cloud computing resources usage.
— We are aimed to use the credits for modelling our command recognition and speaker identification tasks hypothesis on quantum cloud computers with up to 14 real qubits, — said Andrey Yashkin.
The rest time of the Hackathon the team will continue to tackle the grand prize of summer internships at CERN.
