[Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay]

I think 2021 will be the year when QC becomes more democratized and goes mainstream. While technologies like IoT, hybrid cloud, and data analytics — will still strongly have their position in the business landscape —, I see an expanding usage of AI, fifth-gen networks (5G), and above all, quantum computing. Besides its applications in cybersecurity, drug development, financial modeling, better batteries, traffic optimization, climate change, materials discovery, simulation, AI, etc., it can take our understanding of nature and chemistry to a level that has never been feasible before.

I expect the following quantum trends to accelerate in 2021.

1. Quantum Machine Learning- AI and Machine Learning. As AI has seen many applications already, it is the next realistic step to leverage quantum machine learning for easy and realistic QC usage.

2. Covid-19 and Beyond: QC could play a pivotal role in use cases like vaccine development and identifying and managing the spread of viruses. Potential applications of QC include predicting the evolution of COVID-19 using quantum machine learning. Quantum sensors, including NV-diamond sensors, have the potential to detect COVID-19. Quantum plasmonic sensors with considerably less noise could be utilized in blood protein analysis, chemical detection, and atmospheric sensing.

3. Quantum Algorithms: The development of new Quantum Algorithms and conversion from classical algorithms into quantumized algorithms.

4. Performance improvement and Optimization of Quantum Noise.

5. Development of new (or advancements in) Real-Time architectures for QC.

6. Use Cases: Expanding Industrial Use Cases suitable for Quantum Computing.

7. Conventional cum Quantum: Hybrid computing approach to problem-solving. This new paradigm of computation with a hybrid approach will result in the emergence of novel ways to solve the existing business problems and bring new opportunities, which were inconceivable earlier.

8. Adoption: Quantum computing enterprise adoption at scale, dependent on advances in storage, integrations, deployments, and security of quantum applications.

9. Advances in Quantum cryptography and Quantum-safe cryptography

10. QCaaS: QC as a Service will be a natural choice for organizations to tap into the experiments.

As we move forward with ongoing research and innovation in Quantum technology, the need for products and platforms that support diverse algorithms, frameworks, and hardware with unified development and deployment experience to the developers will start gaining traction. We saw some initial efforts in this area in the 2019–20 that will get a further impulse in 2021. Though the adoption of Quantum at scale might seem to be a faraway reality, the work in the next 1–2 years will determine the speed at which industry will start strategizing, building, and deploying quantum applications.

By Chan Naseeb

Keywords: Quantum Computing

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