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Quantum Morning Coffee - 2019/08/29



Featuring Africa, NATO, IBM, China, BAQIS...


August 29th 2019 | 1194 readers

Your press review from Quantaneo

Beijing Academy of Quantum Science (BAQIS) opens its doors and seeks to attract students and researchers. This is the opportunity to discover a video, in English, shot to promote this institution that is seeking to recruit 1200 researchers specialized in quantum physics.
 
For its part, Africa would like to take advantage of this next generation of technology, and no longer depend on Asia and North America as is currently the case. In South Africa, the University of KwaZulu-Natal has a research group on quantum computing. IBM would like to make its IBM Q Network available to some 15 African universities that make up the African Research Universities Alliance (ARUA), including the University of Witwatersrand (Wits) in Johannesburg. Among the problems that quantum computing could help to solve are the HIV/AIDS or Malaria epidemics. Pharmaceuticals in major countries invest little in these subjects due to the lack of solvency in the targeted markets. Africa could seek its own solutions and no longer depend on large international laboratories.
One of Africa's assets would be its genetic diversity. Man appeared there 200,000 to 300,000 years ago, but only left to discover the rest of the world about 70,000 years ago. This African genetic diversity could be used in research on new drugs.
The SKA radio telescope project, based in South Africa, which will be the largest in the world, could also be a source of opportunities for quantum computing.
The real challenge will be to involve the whole continent... and not to concentrate all investments, and profits, in South Africa.
 
For NATO, cyber threats fall into the realm of aggression, and could activate Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty. It is about pooling the resources of all alliance members to deal with an attack. If one of the alliance members were targeted by a virus, all members would consider themselves attacked. A European coordination centre has been set up in Mons, Belgium, specializing in cybersecurity. The war of the future will certainly be a digital war, and NATO is counting on all the available resources, in terms of artificial intelligence and quantum computing.

Philippe Nieuwbourg is an independent trainer and analyst, a specialist in data analysis for several… Know more about this author
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