In the world of supercomputing, artificial intelligence has taken up much of the oxygen in the room of late—and for good reason. AI is opening up new frontiers that were previously inaccessible through classic computing technology.
“The thing that’s so exciting is the sort of convergence of AI running with the help of a quantum computer,” said David Isaac, co-founder of Vancouver-based AbaQus, which builds quantum computer solutions for the financial services sector. “You would be able to maybe do things that you could never even imagine doing with a classical computer, no matter how powerful it was.”
While investor confidence in Burnaby-based quantum computing pioneer D-Wave may have flagged of late , some businesses appear to betting on D-Wave technology for optimization solutions in areas like finance and logistics. Other B.C. companies are also exploring quantum computing’s optimization powers for the world of finance and cryptocurrencies.
“The financial industry deals with complex datasets, countless variables and market shifts, making it challenging to build more effective predictive models,” said institute CEO Louise Turner. “Our collaboration with D-Wave uses quantum annealing to optimize ‘feature selection’—identifying the most relevant data points to inform the predictive model more efficiently than existing solutions performed on classical computers.