QuSTEAM and Quantum Education

Okay, in that case, let's go ahead and go live. Hello, everyone. Thanks for joining us. Today we're talking about Quantum Education and the QSTEAM Initiative. I'm joined by Russell Ceballos, who is the Director of Innovation at QSTEAM and also the Associate Director of Curriculum and Education Partnership at the Chicago Quantum Exchange, as well as a lot of great experience teaching students about quantum information sciences. We're also joined by Bennett Brown, who is the Executive Director of the QSTEAM Initiative. And so I'll, I'll turn it over to them briefly. So the format today is that they'll talk a little bit about an overview of a lot of these initiatives and programs, and then we'll talk more generally in conversation about quantum education, some of the challenges there, and the role that both the Chicago Quantum Exchange and QSTEAM play in addressing some of these challenges. So, without further ado, thanks very much for joining us. Thank you.

Thank you so much for having us. Absolutely. I am, as John had mentioned, Russell Ceballos. I am at the Chicago Quantum Exchange, which you can see on my background and hopefully here on my Sharing the screen. Is it. There we go. Is it.

Looks good on my end.

All right, so the Chicago Quantum Exchange is a hub for advancing the science and engineering of confirmation, and we have a pillar for education and workforce development. Our organization really is a consortia spanning, as you see here, the University of Chicago, Argonne National Lab, Fermi National Lab, University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Northwestern University, and we have the Ohio State University as a regional partner and other, a lot of corporate partners. And so we are trying to really build the ecosystem here in Chicago and provide direction nationally and internationally for how to build the most inclusive and the most competitive workforce in confirmation science engineering. As we know this is going to be, I think the linchpin of the technology itself is it's really rests on the people who do it and who will be doing it. And bringing everyone to the table as early as we can is, I think, the best way forward. And that's our focus here in that way. And my, my, you know, charge, I am, as mentioned, the Associate Director of Curriculum Education Partnerships at the Chicago Quantum Exchange. I'm also the Director of Programs Innovation at qe, which is, it was a grant that we were able to take and spin up out of the National Science Foundation's Convergence Accelerator Program. I, I went to Southern Illinois University of Carbondale, studied with Dr. Mark Bird and Dr. Eric Chetambar, and it was really, really wonderful learning from Them as well as in. My Math advisor was Dr. Jersey Kochic and I don't have a traditional background really is the main thing. I have started off in interdisciplinary studies looking at brain and quantum chemistry and molecular dynamics. It's a long winding path but at the end of the day I ended up getting my PhD in the theory, working in the theory of open quantum systems. And along the way I've done a lot of different types of work in quantum biology and materials type unique types of materials and so yeah, I try to bring an interdisciplinary approach to everything that I do and especially, most especially education and so I'll give it over to, to Bennett and. Oh actually give me one more second. I wanted to share. The opportunities we have here at the Chicago Quantum Exchange are many and plentiful and span a great many different tiers or levels or entry points to to Quantum, one of which is one of these professional programs in a four day intensive course. This is the first one we provided and started and then there's now an eight week Quantum Science networking communications course. These are, these are really wonderful opportunities to get certificate and get, get some training especially for those coming into the field from an industry field, already a really established person field. We have the Open Climate initiative that I'm very intimately engaged with and these students are just absolutely amazing. This is primarily an undergraduate summer research fellowship program but it has a lot of legs. We go to industry site during the first part of the summer for our first kickoff event. Then the students go to the labs that they will be spending their summers in in the Chicago Quantum Exchange ecosystem. And at the end they all come to the University of Chicago to give their research presentations at the OQI Research Symposium. But then we provide throughout the year programming support and networking opportunities for the fellows. And we have a really, really successful program in that students end up coming back to Quantum, stay in Quantum or move into positions internships that they really wanted. There's a Teach Quantum which is a program focus on getting high school teachers engaged and getting curriculum into high schools. Then there's Quantum Quick Start which is really looking to get the students, high school students engaged as early as possible. And this I will put in the chat real quick right now. This is done by the Chicago Quantum Exchange and Boeing. This is a little, excuse me, a little video series focused on high school students just to introduce and engage and hopefully interest people from coming in to come in from all walks of life. And qsteam which I will pass off to Bennett introduce and talk about. And I am very happy to be a part of this initiative. And yeah, really glad to be here.

Thanks so much. And we'll make sure that the YouTube audience has those links here in just a moment. So thanks Bennett for joining us as well.

Thank you so much for having us. It's really a pleasure to connect with the user community beyond the Q Steam network. I'm the Executive Director of the Q Steam Initiative, a nonprofit incorporated in Ohio as a result of the NSF Convergence Accelerator Grant of the same name that you see the principal investigators there on the right side. So Russell Ceballos, Chicago Quantum Exchange and physics is listed third on that list. He was during that two year NSF Convergence accelerator funded effort, a coordinator across seven teams among 72 professors at 20 institutions. And my job was to incorporate a nonprofit to scale that work from those 19 institutions to 300 institutions in 2027 is our goal. We are a nonprofit, but we aim to scale like a startup but without VC capital. We've stood up services that represent the range of services that our initial 19 campuses asked for to launch or expand quantum information science and engineering programs at the undergraduate level. So what Russell talked to you about from the Chicago Quantum Exchange and the universities like the University of Chicago or University of Illinois in Champaign Urbana. The members of the Chicago Quantum Exchange overlap significantly with SO UIUC is also a member of the QSTEAM Initiative, as is University of Chicago. But the R1s that incorporated initially span the research universities. The R1s, Ohio State University was the lead founding member. Michigan, Michigan State and North Carolina Ag and Tech, which is the country's largest HBCU Historically Black college or University, were co founders of the Q Steam nonprofit, which we're now scaling and continuing sustaining the services that were created under the nonprofit grant. So under the NSF grant. So the NSF grant was to develop and pilot four courses in quantum information at the undergraduate level across two and four year institutions. The list that you see at the top right there, those institutions include their majority minority serving institutions. Most of them are MSIs and they include a set of community colleges. And then we've added the University of Iowa, Middle Tennessee State University. These are non support like they found the money in their campuses to offer the services on their campuses from Q STEAM that would promote their program. So Russell's going to mostly talk to you about the modular curricula and in particular how he's using the materials that he's developed in the classroom, the ways that he's engaged with the rest of the team that spans a huge host of Disciplines everything from business, economics, chemistry, philosophy, to what you'd expect of the four founding disciplines of quantum information science and engineering. So those would be math, computer science, physics and electrical engineering. And our founding board, I'm going to scroll back a slide you'll notice spans not only a wide range of institutions, but all of the departments that I just mentioned. I want to call out in particular Ray Samuel at the mention. NCAT is the largest hbcu. He heads the IBM Quantum Computing Center. IBM HBCU Quantum Computing center at ncat, which of course is headed at Howard University as a national institution. So I'll turn it back to Russell to talk about his work using some of the curriculum that he and this huge team of professors, a quarter of whom are educational researchers, really trying ultimately to scale early to non R1 institutions using pedagogical tools in the classroom that are evidence based and known to develop a sense of belonging and a change in identity to that of a STEM career professional. So thank you again for the opportunity. I guess I was introducing myself too, so I'm going to take 30 more seconds and mention that I have 20. My background is 20 years of experience in the high school classroom at the end, at the college. In the college classroom sort of at the boundary focused on upper high school education, lower undergraduate education. So the first four courses out of an eight course set that QSTEAM developed are for freshmen and sophomores with very little prerequisites. No prerequisites, a Gen Ed. We have a whole menu of courses I could jump ahead to, but. So my, my work has been. I should have had that slide at the ready there. But my work previous to Q steam I have degrees in physics from MIT from the University of Iowa in which I studied fentosecond laser characterization of semiconductor materials grown by MBE to develop triple junction solar cells. So you know, I got the physics traps, but mostly my background has been in education. I wrote a computer science course for the national nonprofit project Lead the Way and scaled during the first four years of operation to a whole team, a K12 program that we were also studying in conjunction with Purdue and taught the teachers that the first 60 teachers that implemented the AP Computer Science Principles course, the instance of which I had written and then worked with them to scale to over a thousand schools. I don't know how many they're in now with that program. So thank you, Russell. I really appreciate all the work you've led here at in the. In the nonprofit phase and that you continue to work with for both CQE and qsteam, thank you to Wolfram.

Thank you. And actually, I think I'm gonna kick it right back to you, Bennett. Keep it with you there. If you keep that your screen shared with that deck.

Sorry.

No, no, no. Could you go into a little bit more of the comprehensive overview of the suite of services that QSTEAM is currently providing and you know, sort of give it, give a little overview of that and, and how these, this minor fits into that.

The best deck for that really would be.

And specifically when you say Q steam minor, you're talking about sort of the level of study that one would expect from a minor degree in, let's say a university course of study. This is, this is the analog of that. But one thing I'm curious about is you mentioned sort of these non traditional, outside of getting a degree ways of understanding quantum information science. And so one thing I'd love to also talk more about is in this suite of services, there's all these different cohorts of quantum information has some common threads, but also looks a little bit different maybe in the context of, let's say adult education or college students or younger students. So help our audience understand some of these different threads and how they all tie in together to the overarching theme of, of having people understand more about quantum information science.

Yeah, so I think I'll take the last part of your question first. Like what does it look like at the different levels? So the Chicago Quantum Exchange, of course, is engaged with all three levels. At the graduate level, the undergraduate level, sort of the public facing level, like the Open Quantum initiative And then the K12 initiative for the United States is, is the Q12 initiative, which was initially based at the University of Illinois, Champaign, Urbana. Our focus has been undergraduate education. And so I can certainly talk about the differences there, but I'll, I'll pivot from in both cases the undergraduate level. So what we've developed is for students that don't necessarily know anything beforehand, we assume algebra. But even there we provide bridge material because we're really aiming to broaden participation and provide new kinds of on ramp. And by we I mean qsteam. So the difference between undergraduate and graduate education and workforce direct education upskilling, reskilling is really in sort of what you assume. So a chemist coming to look to add quantum chemistry understanding, like how to run VQE, doesn't want a review of trigger. So our materials really try to start off with the undergraduate classroom. The high school necessarily is shallower, is shorter, is meant for inclusion in, you know, High school teachers are already under intense challenge on in days down to minutes to cover established standards. I was co chair of the Iowa Computer Science Standards team and had engagement at the national level as the US adopted computer science standards. And you know, even to get one bullet item in there about quantum computing right now that's more than we have. So at the K12 level there's great work being done. Fermilabs developed a fantastic QKD activity for instance, but it just looks different. There are long documents about opportunities to incorporate an AP physics or AP computer science courses that come from the Q12 initiative. But ultimately there's not a lot of overlap except for the first course here, which we structure as a Gen Ed. So you know, this first course in, in the QSTEAM sequence of, of six courses for a minor or you know, eight out of eight courses that looks like the high school and the middle school stuff. The.

Yeah. And as a matter of fact, very specifically we have engaged with community colleges at the outset so to kind of reframe the conversation of the different types of players, if you will, in the ecosystem and the different levels, the educational levels, how it all kind of plays out. What we are focused on as an organization is accelerating the ramp up of the workforce. And in order to do that, we need to train people as well. In order to train people, we need to train people, we need to help educate faculty on one side to learn subject matter expertise, on the other side learning how like education research and how to implement it. And on the third side, even there's just tools from industry that a lot of faculty are hesitant to engage with and for a lot of different reasons, understandable reasons. And so it's trying to navigate the overall space in order to focus efforts that will in the long term pay out exponentially. And so for us, our focus is at the undergraduate level, both developing the curriculum, but developing curriculum to help introduce the notion of QIs to faculty and help faculty learn to develop their own curriculum. So kind of a flywheel structure. And so what we have in this is a lot of material and content that's very raw and rough, but spans, as Bennett was saying, a zero math background assumption. A high school diploma is assumed on some level because they are taking college class, but a GED is absolutely equivalent in this case. So we want to make sure on one hand this, this connects to those, those individuals and that's a lot of the general public, adult public, right in the United States of America. And so fortunately, fortunately for us, that, that, that means that. And so, so on one hand we are able to engage and connect with the broader community and the public on one hand, and we're, you know, but like Bennett was saying, I'm going to kick it back over to him. We have the, the sort of focus at the undergraduate level for some very specific reasons. And what we are doing there to make sure that people have the resources and tools required to again, ramp up the quantum activity and programming in their own institution in order to establish programs, establish internship opportunities and just, you know, the, the span the space of Quantum, if you will. And so, yeah, Ben, please.

I, you know, I don't want to take any, any time from you, Russell, because I really want you to present how you use these tools in your classroom and, and how that connects to Wolfram. I'll mention, you know, when I was working at the high school, space students, no, no previous knowledge of, of coding whatsoever, but they used Python to, to access a large database and plot a graph of, you know, the frequency, their name versus year, and analyze the very much larger data set. But they used Wolfram Alpha for that too, and then saw like, what other abstractions can you create that, that you, you know, you can interact with large data sets through tools like Wolfram Alpha, like Mathematica, to deal symbolically. So I just wanted to kind of mention the industry integration at the high school level too is, is completely possible, but at the, at the college level we've really given access to, so I mentioned six categories of services when I had that other screen up. So access to quantum devices through virtual experiences, you know, where there's an actual quantum device, but you're accessing it remotely through a webcam and motors on polarizers and so on. But that's one category. But another category is curriculum modules. And I think, Russell, what you were passing it back to me to talk about was the, the, the, the trifecta that QSTEAM is trying to address. So not only are we trying to create more round ramps and include more people and specifically to expand the workforce in qic, but we're also trying to improve STEM education broadly so by including in professional development for faculty like, okay, you're coming from any discipline, so I can't assume you know how to code. I can't assume you know, quantum mechanics, and I can't assume really that you know how to deal with ma. So ultimately we're talking about, it doesn't matter if they're an entering undergraduate, a high school student or a faculty, because everybody feels uncomfortable. This is a big lift for a campus to launch a quantum information science and engineering program. And for that reason, professors are looking for materials that they can implement, even turnkey or that they can Adapt at an R1. You know, those faculty are getting course release time to develop a course. So they. They want tools. Everybody wants good stuff that'll include students, that's good with all students, that engages students, that follows ev but they don't know how to do that. It's been a recalcitrant problem to do what's known to be best practice, which is anything but lecture. So what we try to do is provide not only tools that let professors use backward design, where there's tight alignment between goals, what the students do to produce evidence they understand, and the assessment that is based on that. So backward design is huge. This is a deck that comes from our zero course, which is a fact. So we have courses zero through eight, course zeros for faculty or high school teachers. And so understanding that if you start class with a student student engagement, that you'll build a community and that it actually changes student identities and that it gives you a chance to overhear some students talking about things that are based in their expertise, of their experience in Thai. And so we provide slides that specifically allow that, like, when's the time that you thought two things at once, that you felt two things at once, but it wasn't until you acted that you sort of settled on one of two inconsistent courses of action. That superposition in a hand wavy way and talking about how it is and isn't a good metaphor for superposition is a good thing to do. We think we're studying that.

It's nice to see these explicit reflections included in STEM curriculum. Right. Because, you know, I recall from my educational psychology courses that, you know, creating these opportunities where after students have dealt with phenomena, maybe they've used computers in helping them model something. You know, having this really explicit reflection about understanding how what they've just been doing connects with the sort of bigger picture of what they're trying to gain. An understanding in a new area can really help them, as you say, both form an identity as someone who is on the path to becoming an expert in this area, but also helps with the retention of knowledge and sort of the community aspect of learning as well.

Yeah. Carnegie Mellon University did a fantastic job. It's in kicking butt in computer science, described how they pivoted from a tiny percentage of women to 50% women in their undergraduate computer science program. And it's all about redefining what's in the discipline. So this is not about physics and electrical engineering. This is about everything. Because quantum is going to impact everything. You want to be a chemist, you need to know about quantum, but you want to be anything. It helps to understand at the high level. An executive needs to know about quantum at a high level. And so starting with why is this so important? Is a very important strategy. And including the arts is huge. These students have designed a dance describing cooper pairs, having projects like entangling two eight sided dice. So that's a seven qubit program right there. And every student result looks different because they had a hand in designing what the result was supposed to look like. But how you instruct, you know, having active learning opportunities, professors really shouldn't be talking for more than 10 or 15 minutes at a time before asking the audience something. So let me ask, are people able to chime in or is it question only?

Well, so we actually do have a couple of audience comments already that, that people are saying they would have loved to have more courses on both quantum information, quantum algorithms when. When they were in school. Right. Because as you were saying, you know, there has been a need arguably for this kind of curriculum for a long time, but in recent, as the technologies of building quantum hardware kind of mature, it becomes an even more salient need. Right. So we are having some audience comments already about, you know, they would have loved to have things like this when they were in school. And speaking of such things as well. So you did mention as well that Russell, if you'd like to show sort of how you go about implementing some of this curriculum, as I understand you're teaching a course at Chicago State University for students to understand quantum information science better. And these are students who are coming from computer science background, if I remember correctly.

Yes, that's correct. But it was a seminar course that only had faculty, you know, instructor approval. And so we had, you know, all walks of life, we. I had a. Okay. Who was a biology student and is kind of trying to come into quantum. And so. Yeah, no, it was. And then the thing is, is at Chicago State there are many non traditional students. And by non traditional, I mean of all type. And that includes students who have been going to school for, you know, forever but not been able to get the degree or take certain classes and for the credit. And so I have students that have been trying to get into quantum since I was faculty there in 2017 and they're still at it. And there's. So they come when they can. And so they. And. And people they haven't been involved or engaged for a long time, so they've forgotten math. So even the computer science students, it's kind of a really tough challenge to get a cut the circle, right? Chicken or the egg? Where do you start in a circle. And it's kind of like, well, you got to start in somewhere. You just got to jump in the middle, start somewhere. And so to kind of frame this, the notion that you can do this at all. So I am young enough, old enough to have been told that this won't work at Chicago State University. Like you'll never be able to teach a graduate class in quantum computing at Chicago State University. There's not going to be interest there. The students can't do it. And there's just so many reasons why.

And sure enough, you're teaching one in fact encounter to that that you know what you had been told, right?

That's right. I mean, and we have a center there. So cube. Here we see NSF cube. Quantum Sensing for Biophysics and Bioengineering is a National Science foundation funded Quantum Leap Challenge Institute and our Workforce Development Center Institute. Part of that, that center is at Chicago State University. We have, I mean there's just so many things going on now, right. And so it's, it's, it's kind of shocking I think sometimes to hear that there was, there was such a resistance against even trying to do any of this. At the time in 2017, I was crazy, right? So when I went to Chicago State in 2017, I was bananas talking about doing quantum and, and at the time it would have been the first real undergraduate program in the country at Chicago State University. We had that opportunity, but because there's just this really overwhelming feeling or mentality that it just doesn't belong here and we don't belong in this space. That has still been a huge challenge. Even though one of the students you see here in the Open Quant Initiative picture, Joseph, he's in the reflection there, he's from Chicago State University and he was at IBM there and he's. So we've again, we've had so many different wonderful sort of points of progress, but the wall is, is huge. And so to, to sort of this is where it all started at Chicago State University. So this is actually a little bit thinking about, it's a little emotional because, right. I am from this like literally the south and southeast, the southeast side of Chicago, which if you know what that means, you know. But if most people are like southeast, but what does that know, south side. And what's this east. Well, South Deering, the east side. And South Chicago proper is neighborhoods that I'm from. And then we moved out to Hedwich for a bit. So my mom went Chicago State, my aunt went to Chicago State. Most anybody that I know who went to college, I went down the street, down 95th street to Chicago State University. I got my first library access to read my first physics book books at Chicago State University library, right. Because my mom had a library card. They don't have that. Right. At the public. Just these gravitation. Everybody tried to get a book. The book Gravitation by John Wheeler and Kip Thorne from Chicago Public Library down right 100th and whatever. Yeah, good luck finding that even in the suburbs. When we had to move out to the suburbs, I was able to find a Kip Thorne book on the suburbs at a library. But it was more of a popular science one.

Right.

And I had already gotten in and dipped into gravitation, you know, at that point.

Right.

So because of Chicago State University. So Chicago State University is just, it's, it's, it's, it's a lighthouse, right. For my community. And so when I was there as a lecturer doing the research and trying to do everything, David Ashalam approached me, was like, hey, you know, there's this opportunity. We'd love you to join and help lead this effort up. And so I, I probably still have the, the email somewhere, right. It was just like unbelievable. And while I was there that this Q steam is the opportunity to start doing what we needed to, to make Quantum real and to make it happen. And, and I'm still on that journey and we're still, I'm still trying my best to bring it there on a programmatic, on a higher level level. But again, like from being told that it's impossible to, to then even 2020 ish getting let go from Chicago State as a lecture, which is insane public records. You could see how much a lecture makes a Chicago State University. And it's like I was fighting for that, but it just didn't belong. Quantum just didn't belong at CSU at the time. And so I'm still trying to fight to bring it back there. And, and so this is how we do it. So I couldn't do it alone by myself, right. So while I was there, and this is like, this is nothing on IBM, right. It's just how in the dark we are on the south side of Chicago. How literally no one sees us and even thinks we exist in this space. They had come out with The IBM HBCU Quantum Computing center while I was at Chicago State University. And I was like, man, you know, I don't know of anybody from one of these neighborhoods who went out, got their PhD in Quantum, came back to their neighborhood and is like doing the quantum thing, is trying to push this kind of thing.

And.

But they had no idea about me, right?

And.

But there wasn't anybody really out there. To this day, there's not many people like that. I don't, you know, so that was just how in the dark we were. So I needed to be able to connect with industry. I needed to connect with other universities that had the resources and the faculty and the passion, the interest to drive to, to do this quantum thing. And so University of Chicago, Chicago Quantum Exchange. That, that was the network, that was the ecosystem that said, yeah, you know, this is, this is, this is what we have to do. Let's try to figure this out. And it. Zeke is the PI. He couldn't be with us today, but he was David Ashalam's grad student right back in Santa Barbara. And so it's kind of all in the family. Zeke said, oh, at the osu, the Ohio State University now, and he's PI. So, so it's kind of started as a seed in the Midwest and with that kind of network. But again, to then start from that phase one grant, to then apply for phase two and to get the full funding to try to really stand up a full organization, we kind of started with a small flywheel. And the notion was this. And again, this is all coming from the needs that I was experiencing as a quantum information theorist trying to make quantum happen at Chicago State University, solo, really at the time, is that we needed things that were modular. We needed things in the sense that you, you develop something that has tethers so that you can put it into any course or a set of existing, pre. Existing courses in a, in a meaningful way. So what do I mean by that? For example, at Chicago State, one thing we're doing with Cube center is developing like a certificate program that. And it's really Val Goss and Archie Peters, right, leading that effort. They're, they're there and we're looking to establish existing coursework to implement the quantum curriculum that we have and that even QSTEAM has developed. Because at places like Chicago State University, the notion that you can create a new class is insane. It's just laughed out of the room outright because who's going to teach it, who's going to develop it, who's Going to spend the time to pass it through the curriculum committee. It's just a no go. It's just a. Literally there's no hiring. There's really like, there's no develop. You work with what you got. Like literally like when you're in these spaces, you have to work with what you have.

And I remember we had, we had talked when we first met about how, you know, quantum education has kind of a bootstrapping problem because, you know, not, not only is there a need to have students quickly accelerated through you know, be quantum ready, but also, as you were just alluding to, you know, there's not the numbers of faculty that we would like to have to teach all the students. You know, if you are, let's say, associated with, let's say, I don't know, like University of Chicago or University of Illinois, like there are some faculty who've already sort of had that training. But if we're talking about quantum everywhere, which is kind of the goal, then you need more faculty who are, you know, going to, you know, step up and teach quantum as well. And so you're just alluding to the need for having curriculum materials that allow people to do that easily.

Exactly. And curriculum materials that are easily accessible, that work well out of the box and that don't break and you don't always have to fix or someone can do it. You can call like for us working. So for me and I will get to this here in a second. Mathematica, of course, has been a staple of my toolbox, actually probably the main tool that I use other than a pencil on piece of paper, you know, stick in sand. Because of exactly what I was just saying. It's tried and true, easy to use, easy to teach somebody how to use. So and, and, and it works. Honestly, I mean, that might not sound like a real high bar, but if you're in the computational space, if you're in the technology space and then you're in the education space, man, that is. Those are a lot of really small needles that you have to thread in order to, to really get this, this braid working. Right. And so that it's an amazing thing. Mathematica had what you. Wolfram has done with Mathematica and we are working with Q braid to work on the coding side of that platform. And finding a way to integrate those two would be amazing. Chicago Quantum Exchange had provided me with this amazing iPad. I've never had anything like that where I can write and put on the screen, you know, like share remotely and all that. And it like, works, you know, with the, with the writing tool. It just. The Apple II pencil for math. It's really hard to find these types of tools that you can use, integrate with all these other. Other software and other tools.

And.

And these all do talk to each other and do so. So accessibility is key. And as we will see. And what I want to highlight is there's accessibility to technology, but it comes in two forms. One is really computer based and digital, I will say, and the other comes in hands on experience. And so far, both have been hurdles for many different reasons. Interestingly enough, the computer technology, if you will, the digital wall is actually much lower for the students than it is for the faculty.

That's an interesting observation.

So, yeah, it's a lot easier to get the students engaged and working on their phones.

Right.

So like, all that's what. That's when especially Q braid, I was like, oh, okay, we got to do something like this because they're able to, like, literally develop code. Somebody can code off their phone and run a quantum program off their phone. Right. Like, and. And the thing is, that might sound crazy. Who would do that? Well, someone who doesn't have a computer. Right, right. Students don't. Right. So when Covid happened, people don't understand what kind of emergency situation that put us in. And now nobody realized it because our students were dying. There's. Their families were dying from COVID Right. This was something that people were dropping like flies. And so I took this Covid, like, very seriously. And around me in the suburbs and other places, it was kind of like, oh, man, you're. You're being extra about this. Like, that's. It's not all that. I'm like, well, you don't know my community. Like, my family, my family, friends, like, we were losing all kinds of people every week. It was another story of a student. And so we don't hear about the technology crisis that so many students just dropped out and just. They don't have computers, so they can't come to class. They can't. It was. It was terrible for Chicago State. We were finally climbing our way back, and then this happens. And even when the students could get online on their phones, they couldn't get a strong signal, they couldn't get a secure signal, a stable signal, and they can't use their cameras. So if you're lucky, you're talking to yourself on a blank screen at the. For, you know, at best at Chicago State, trying to teach at this point. And so the phone was crucial, and it made Me realize how important technology and industry and connecting with industry is going to be in order to make quantum accessible to everybody. And, and so what we're been. So the whole idea is to structure these modules which can be ported into all these different places because like you were saying, faculty don't have the experience to just go and teach or the institutions and have the ability to just go and create a whole program or ecosystem for quantum to live in. And so they take what they can, what they're comfortable with and put into their class. So modern physics is a great, a great example. Modern physics has relativity and an introduction to quantum mechanics through a historical perspective, typically quickly. But if you restructure that, you can take this and some of these modules and take confirmation science and work it into modern physics curriculum and still hit all the learning objectives and still get at the principles. And so that, that's one, one example. But again, what we are seeing is that this is a full ecosystem issue. And so we need to rebuild STEM pedagogy without, if you will, legacy barriers. For to me that means bias, preparation bias. So right now it's, it's a matter of, well, yeah, anybody can get into quantum. If you've taken linear algebra, taking different, you know, you start listing all the courses that you've had to take before you can get in and say yes for everybody. Except. And so how do we get at this? Right, so customized curriculum, making it modular, recruitment, community network, bringing more people in, faculty, students, public engagement, administration, deans. Right, everybody. Industry partners. And then there's professional development. And these arrows actually go both ways, right? All around. And so professional development is again, for, for STEM pedagogy as well as subject matter expertise. I'm just going to skip over this. Hopefully we can all understand that we want to be competitive, right? And to be honest, I'm not here trying to sell everybody on the, oh, let's, let's hold hands in, you know, kumbaya. It's like, no, no, no, I want to be competitive. Like, I want to, I want to do the best science that I can do. Not just an individual, but as a community, right? Not just a community member of the south side of Chicago, but as a person in this country, as a person of this world. And so I don't, you know, personally, I went to University of Chicago, I went to a lot of elite institutions, but the attitude I have is very much one from my neighborhood, which is that we don't accept like lesser than. We don't compromise our values in many ways. We don't compromise on certain things. There's just certain things we don't compromise on. And excellence is something I in my community cannot compromise on. So when we bring ourselves, our full selves to the table, you're getting full like a competitive advantage, a fully competitive individual that's bringing everything they have to compete, not just to maybe do something well, but to compete. And that's the kind of culture we need in the United States right now to establish ourselves as the international leader. I mean we were and now we're kind of like, you know, it's where people are buying, you know, and Australia is out there, you know, I mean, I mean we got the UK doing their thing and we've got Netherlands doing their thing and of course, man, you know, China Cushion is breathing down our necks and that's not a problem. But let's face it, they have a very different, as a government, they have a very different set of values and opinions about how information works and how they function in their society. And so for me, I want to be the most competitive and I want to make sure we as a country as competitive as we can be. And here we see IBM talking about how we can do this and faculty strategy and QSTEAM is a huge part of that. Right? Developing a diverse ecosystem and making it national. So the main thing is, right, we want to make sure we're front loading concepts, backloading mathematical formatisms, making sure that the courses are project based and involve industry, employers, all stage of development. Why all that is important? Because at the end of the day we want the students to be able to have employable skills. And by employable we're talking about grad school, right? That's an employment opportunity. So if you're able to do the research, get in to grad school. That's wonderful. So when we're doing this and developing these, these, these programs and curricula, we're not saying like, oh well, research isn't important and you know, we're just going to train people to, to do some, some thing for companies specific, it's like, no, we want to make people competitive for the whole space and of all, for all the opportunities.

Since the same skill set really is relevant to many of these different pursuits. Right. And having that, as you mentioned, you know, front load the concepts so that people then can decide, okay, so in the area, let's say I'm a chemist or I'm a biologist or whatever, the area that they specifically care about, they can then take on board whatever the mathematical formalism is Necessary. Which might look a little bit different in each of these areas from, from what it looks like from the way that you've designed your curriculum.

Exactly. That's, that's the whole thing. Right? I mean, planning mechanics is the same.

Right.

Confirmation theory is effectively the same. I mean there's a few ways you can take it and you can use Heisenberg, you know, approach or Schrodinger, you know, but it's really the same that you can have your interpretations all you want, the results are going to be the same, your calculations are going to be the same. And so what you need is like reskinning, if you will. And, and that kernel is why I in particular have been pushing the notion of leveraging game design theory and game theory in order to do exactly what you were just talking about. Take the core concepts and the core skill set that's required statistics. So for Quantum and many other STEM fields, foundational fields like AI and artificial and machine learning, linear algebra, statistics, and ultimately strategic games like the idea of strategy. And so you have these three elements and all of a sudden you can re skin these core elements into many different types of games. There's the CHSH game, there's. I mean there's just so many different games that you can just. There's the hat game coming out of game theory and then taking it into a quantum analog, which is what I do.

Yeah, the CHS gate CHSH game is one of our favorites for, for when we do presentations on, on understanding the difference between classical and quantum in terms of how this impacts what you can do with an algorithm.

And that's, that's how I actually introduce a lot of my toxic. My favorite way to introduce it is through CHSH that hey, you want to know why quantum is important? We'll see what you can do with quantum that you can't do classically. Like that notion. Not that, oh, this thing that we can predict now win this game is the end of the world is the, you know, be all, end all. But it's the fact that you have the notion that you can see that, oh, this used to be impossible, but now that I have this new Quantum tool which is just a system in my hands, the tool is having a system, it's just an object and being able to understand what you can do with that object. And that's the most important thing. And so it's taking that idea and trying to put it into every layer of our engagement. And again, like I was saying, Q braid is one of these diagrammatic calculus trying to develop.

I want to real quick inject an audience question that we had as it looks like you're getting into this topic. Right. So you were showing the way that you use qbraid and diagrammatic things to work with circuits there. So our audience question was that they'd love to see more of what you were talking about in terms of what does your teaching and projects look like in terms of what are the students doing and working on. And so, yeah, you mentioned that you have some stuff here that you can screen share that the audience is definitely very interested to see that. So it looks like that was right, what you were about to start talking about before I injected that little audience comment.

While he gets his screen ready. I've been dying to jump in there.

Yeah, yeah, please.

One. You know, one of the baskets of services that we offer out of the six baskets is recruiting students. And so one of the things we'll do is help you stand up a quantum club or a quantum hackathon. And we did that. Of course, we use qbraid for that. MIT uses Q Braid for their hackathon. It is the tool of choice because you can specify the virtual container and all the packages that the student. So what Russell's about to show you is a jupyter notebook. Excellent executing on cuberate. And we give. We make that easy for you. We provide a teacher dashboard that you can only get through us. For distributing QPU credits, we pass through quantum processing unit credits from manufacturers. Okay, so that's another category I just worked in there. But the, The. The recruitment services of a hackathon. When you were talking about the CHSH game, we ran a hackathon in which the winner was the group that produced a Jupiter notebook that explained their results, executing a program that at least made a bell pair and measured it on a real quantum computer. And so the winner, which, you know, they each got cash and swag. And they were three students that spanned Canada, the United States and India and had written an explanation of their data using the CHSH game. And it was great pedagogical stuff that they produced. And so that's one of the things you get, you know, as a. As a professor at Acoustine Affiliated University, is the output of all these other people's work, teaching things in innovative ways and riffing on it, having the right to make derivative content from their content and share it with the network. It's really important that we work together because this is changing fast. I have behind me 20 linear feet of bookshelf space in textbooks that Might be appropriate for a quantum information undergraduate course of one type or another. It's a lot to sort through. It's expensive just to look at it. So having access to resources that are ready to go, but also informed not only by the materials out there, but also by industry and national labs, it's a hard thing for one campus. It's a. I mean, I'm just going to say it requires a network. So Russell, thank you. Sorry for let jump.

Oh no, man. Actually you couldn't have done better. Oh crap. I went to the wrong one, to the beginning. That was literally, I couldn't have asked to get set up better than it. We need a network. The tools you're going to see, I want, I'm going to show you. But I really wanted to stress that we did not develop all these tools. We did not. Again, you're going to show you Mathematica what we did about that. But what we do at qsteam and particularly I'm focused on in my work is trying to bring people together and trying to bring resources together to share. It sounds really. It sounds so basic. It's so cordy and so, you know.

It'S actually a hard problem though, right?

I mean that's the thing is it's like I spent so much of time, energy, effort and it's hard. I haven't been able to be like, oh, we have everything working out of the box. So what we have is the ability in Q steam to connect across communities and campuses and ecosystems. So some places are better at quantum computing, some places are better quantum sensing. Some people have like in Chicago, man, we got the network science going on and when we have our Japanese colleagues, you know, Rodney Van Meter, I had showed him earlier out in Japan with networking and so we had somebody, Chris Porter teacher class at the osu along with Pietro Veronese, professor at Booth School of Business and a dean at Dean of Chicago. And they were able to co teach across the institution with that first pilot class and they had amazing projects. Here are those projects and they talk about societal impact and did amazing things. We can't. This is a little old flytrap but, but, but we do have VQuil which is I think an upgrade to this anyways. And that is Brian LaCour's group's sort of work out of UT Austin and, and we are connected with them along with. I've developed some games here on the right hand side. But then to leverage like we're saying diagrammatic calculus and trying to bring them. There's a prototype of a game that I wouldn't play, but I had developed and a student coded up for me. But the one thing I want to, right before I get into the code, there's two things. One thing is the code and the digital resources are one thing. And VQuil is one of those digital resources, even though it's a quantum optics, you know, sort of environment to learn in at the same time we have hands on, but we want, but it has to be remote. So accessibility is key. And so. Right. So I want to center the idea of everything that I'm talking about, all the tools that I'm using. It's with the idea that I'm trying to establish sets of tools that are rigorously tested, assessed and again, do not fail, that can all be remotely accessed on some level. As much as possible. As much as possible. And the reason is to begin with we use set theory and we use even Ben. This is graph theory on the right with benzene. And people don't know, they don't know that these are linear operators, differential operators defined on the edges of the nodes of molecules. And, and that give you these structures and talk about the Lewis notation and all that. No, you know how to push electrons, you know how to push dots and you learn how to work with the tools to give it to you. Nobody has to know full Cantor set theory in order to use Venn diagram. And so yeah, right now the thing on the bottom might not be really decipherable to everybody, but it's my, it's been my estimation that we can develop those tools and that's something that, you know, I'm trying to still do but then again then there's hands on experiences. And so we'll, you know, this is something that I am working on bringing into the classroom and building out Curriculum 4 with UIC and other places. But this is what I do now and what we do have the ability to do now which is work with Cube Mathematica and, and you know, unfortunately I didn't have a nice notebook that was organized that to prepare for this, this. But you can see that I have, I use the iPad. Oh, there's somebody. Oh, perfect, perfect. Thank you, Bennett. And so we have Q Braid you and really what you do is you go to Qsteam.org and here we go. So I need an incognito. So you go to QSTEAM.org and you go to login, log into Q Braid and you set up an account there for free and you get in and you have access to a Whole bunch of tutorials and code. So here's what I finished the CSU course with. It was all built up to be able to run Grovers using a three qubit register to look through an eight list, an eight element list. And this is one of the tutorials Amazon had developed and Q Braid provides and it's really set up out of the box. And so I just run through this. We go to the classical simulator we have. Oh, sorry. This is. This was. I was on Grover's. This. This was what Bennett was just talking about. I clipped over to this to highlight the hackathon problem that Ben was talking about. Apologies. I just went.

You have Grovers in the next tab in qbrid.

Yeah, yeah. I pulled back to this one. So I have this one open and I just want to show people that this is what Bennett was talking about. And this is all accessible for free on qbraid right now along with this. And this is what I went and built up the course to do and focus on at the end of the day is I wanted students to have the basic understanding of the gates involved of the. Or so the Oracle and the diffusion operator. And, and I did, I did not exclusively use just this tutorial. We worked in a lot of basic math and then matrix, you know, operator algebra and worked into the actual algorithm for Grovers at a high level. I like this article here.

I've also put into the chat for our audience that they should be able to see pretty soon here some examples that we have on Grover's algorithm too. Because I always like to see. It looks like we're in perfect alignment on what teaching examples we always like to reach for is ones that students should build towards use to understand the, the concepts involved here.

Yeah. I mean again, I was looking for some, for some tabs and I was going to hit on this, but one of my go to tabs for my class is Wolfram. Right. And it's your tutorial.

Right.

And so I, I love this. I love this. And, and so what we have is a suite, right, of all these resources and there's just no real one unified place yet to. To engage. And so Q Braid is starting to become one of these, I feel like platforms where we might be able to integrate some of this stuff because that's the thing, right? There's all this amazing things out there. And unfortunately or fortunately there is no quote unquote, silver bullet whatever whatever. There's no one solution to a general problem. I mean, it's very much like I won't go into the analogy in Quantum. But, but you, you, you're not. Yeah, so, so you're not going to be able to do both things at the same time. So because you want to bring everyone involved in engage, you want to engage everybody and they come from all walks of life. So there's no one way to approach any one thing because you're trying to constantly bring in new people, people who don't have the background or have had the privilege of being trained in the way that makes sense how you can engage with the audience. And so I want to jump in.

There because every campus is different, but there is an overlap that's big between any two campuses. And there's always a campus out there that has a huge overlap. So a community college with an existing microelectronics program is different than a community college with an existing program in H Vac is different than a Stanford is different than an undergraduate only institution that has a logistics company next door. So you know whether even you go in the software hardware direction or which direction and hardware ought to be influenced by the research directions of the faculty, the neighboring job market and so on. And so every place is different, but everybody needs help doing it and can benefit from collaborating in a way that is frankly more open than I think academics are maybe used to the, the model that you keep things to yourself until it's published, you know, it's been improved by, you know, the archive and so on. But it's, it's, I'm seeing a lot of enthusiasm among faculty to contribute materials there where they can maintain their own copyright. But, but they're giving permission to a large network to use the materials, create derivative work and with attribution. So the attribution is key for academics and version control is key. So you know who contributed what. But some system to include everything out there. VQL's not our tool. Right. University of Texas Austin is not in the QSTEAM network, but we speak with them, we meet with everybody who will meet with us and find out what are the strengths in your campuses. How can we direct people to the right graduate program to find the right advisor to the right undergraduate program?

This is a complicated problem and actually.

We have a great audience question that I want to inject here related to some of these topics, which is that our audience is really interested to know. So how can you know places like the Chicago Quantum Exchange, Q Steam industry partners like Wolfram, what can we do to increase opportunities for women in Quantum? And what are some things that are already being done along These lines.

Absolutely. I'll take that in large part. We see that a lot of the efforts. So for me, my main effort is in, when we talk about broadening participation. I mean that with a capital B and a capital P. And so that's everybody. And women, you know, especially, and especially African American women. So we have for. Okay, for example, there are a number of programs. The Open Climate Initiative that I was talking about is one of these programs. It's a program that addresses the problem of, well, how do you get experience if you need experience to get experience? And we, you know, faculty of color particularly, and Kayla Lee out at IBM independently, we all have very similar experiences. Right. The world is what it is and we have very similar experiences. And so when I was at a conference talking about my experiences and the barriers to inclusion and what I'm proposing to try to like get around this, they were, they were like, oh, we're talking about the same thing, which is that even when we get funding, even when we get an opportunity to do something in Quantum. So they had the IBM HBCU Quantum center, but their students still weren't getting IBM internships. And it was because, well, they didn't have the research experience as other applicants. And so even though they're now engaged in this network and they're starting to get some experience and some research kind of thing, it just didn't stack up, up. And so it's like, okay, so we're just, it's, we're always chasing our tail in a sense, we're always chasing something. And so we're like, okay, how do we again cut the circle? And this program came out of the Chicago Quantum Exchange, a particular working group. So we were talking about again, these barriers and there was a working group at the Chicago Quantum Exchange of trainees and some faculty that were really looking to run this patient and address this issue surrounding women, especially, you know, African American women and the lack of them in stem, but most importantly in Quantum. And this program is one that focuses to broaden participation by helping establish equity, diversity, inclusion as priorities. But the real thing is the assumptions of what are coming in. You don't have to have research experience, you don't have to be at a, at a university, you can be at a community college, you can be a first year. This, the idea was to really make something so that we could focus on first year type students and really provide a lot of opportunities for students that would never get an opportunity. But now they can start early, come back, get say a normal REU at an Institution one of their institutions and the next summer and then eventually get an internship again IBM or one of these places. That was always the goal. And so the quantum quick start. I'm sorry, the Quick Quantum videos are also very much focused on this and trying to engage with everybody and women in particular and bring women into the field. It was edited and directed by Meredith and Becky our, our team's team. And so this is a huge focus of ours and QSTEAM is doing this in large part by. Let me. I'm just gonna pull up the slide deck real quick by these types of initiatives so, so that people can see themselves. So, so this can be a bit of a, a tough slide to understand because on one, it's easy on one hand if you have some educational research experience. But there's so much implied here. So what does it mean to front load mathematical concepts, applications and career awareness? This is saying that when we come to the classroom, everybody who's in that classroom brought something. He brought something really important. And women in particular and minoritized individuals of all kinds of are often the first ones to be to have what they're bringing the table ignored because it doesn't fit into the typical preparation set of, of skills maybe of experiences that the traditional framework has established as being prepared. Establish what. What means to be prepared. Which in our. Unfortunately, I think in science right now, in stem, there's too much of a direct correlation between, between the concepts of being properly prepared and being capable of success. And those are two things. I understand how they go together. I understand that. But if we want to bring more people, including women into the table, we cannot continue to do the same things we've been doing in the classroom. And that means developing relationships with employers that are women led. So I have amazing collaborations with Sandbox AQ and the education team there is led by Mariana. Right Bonamame. And so she's amazing. And we. And of course there's cubic by qubit that we talk with. And so we want to make sure inclusion equity and you know is equity is the path to inclusion. So inclusion is the goal bring everybody into this field and women in particular. So we want to make sure when we have materials, we have content and we have speakers, we want to make sure we're representing everybody and we have women speakers because there's plenty wonderful, amazing talented professionals in the field. We don't need to always have the same kind of panel and the same type of speaker all the time. And so we are very active. And this is at the Chicago Quantum Exchange in particular, very focused on this. I mean, the Chicago Quantum Exchange itself is basically run and managed by the vast majority women. I mean, there's, there's vast majority, right? Our CEO to the directors, all our directors in the. Other than David Ashalom. I mean, I can keep going, right? I mean, there's myself, David Shimora, David Ashalom in the actual organization. So I mean, yeah, I might be forgetting somebody, but I don't know.

And to paraphrase some of this for the audience, you know, we were talking about making sure that, you know, when a student says, I want to go do a research opportunity for an undergraduate, or you know, maybe I'm not even at a university, but I want to go do a research experience because I know this is an industry that I want to know more about making sure that the opportunities are there so that people can actually go do these and develop the skills that they're interested to learn.

And again, making sure that we are providing the proper professional development and the training to the faculty, to the institutions. So that when you have people coming from a different background, women in particular, who might not have in the past come to the program to learn this stuff that you're not like, oh, well, you don't have this, this and this.

See you later.

It's like, oh, no. But you're bringing a lot of things to the table that are going to help you succeed. And we just never counted them before, but now we are, we see how that is important to team building, problem solving, project based problem. So right there in the middle, project based problem solving and team building, these are social skills. And when you have women engaged, when you have all, everyone involved in these projects and these teams, it makes it more competitive, it makes everything better. And so we have to, when we do, we work with our industry, employers very specifically with this in mind, to develop projects that are inclusive.

Right.

They're not just what is effective, what does it mean to be effective? People are going to say, well, I just need it to be effective. I don't need to be inclusive. I'm like, well, the most effective educational content is inclusive. So because you're bringing everybody to the table and it's going to be able to reach everybody there. So that's the most effective thing. And if everybody's involved that was engaged, then they can contribute, you're going to get an amplification effect. So it's. In order to get quantum ramped up, we need to engage and help develop the developmental system cycle right now. I mean, so for me, the Way I think about this is we are in a startup phase of quantum information science. Engineering, technology, like is as a, is a international culture. We're in the startup phase and people are vying. And who is going to succeed in this space? People who typically don't have the, if you will, have it made and have every opportunity laying out in front of them. Right now, in the traditional space, you have to hustle, you have to make something of it. And oftentimes these are minoritized individuals who just haven't. Their talent hasn't been recognized, their inclusion has not been able to be, you know, experienced because it's just, it's a barrier. There's a lot of understandable barriers. And so, particularly with women, making sure that we are developing all of our programming and doing everything we can to make sure that what is in the world is inclusive as in the most effective manner possible. And that, again, is not an easy task. What we tend to do in STEM is rely on what has been done in the past. And because it's tried and true, and we know that if we do it. So, for example, I take a different approach, but there's the sink or swim approach. And I take a completely different approach. I take everyone on my team, right? Like, I take everyone on my team. I don't care. But there's a sink or swim approach. You kick everyone off the pier and whoever gets back up, you're on my team, you can swim. Cool. We're gonna go, we're gonna swim. We're gonna beat everybody out there. But I know everyone on my team can swim because they made it back up off the piercing. Everyone else, I don't know. They're at the bottom.

I don't know.

I didn't see where'd they go. But for me, we bring everyone. And in that way we will find a way to develop, you know, either flotation devices or there's engineering, right? You, you take a different problem, right? I mean, physics is famous for this, right? I mean, as a physicist, this is how it was taught. It's like, okay, go do go establish a problem you want to work on. And then when you realize that that problem's too hard because it will be again. You know, that's what I was told. I guarantee you the problem, you choose, it's going to be too hard. This is the way it is. You know, I don't care what you're doing, you're going to pick a problem, you're going to want to do something that's going to Be too hard. And then what do you do? You take that problem and you break it up into smaller problems and you take that set of problems and you pick one and you say, okay, which one can I solve here? And chances are that one you're not going to be able to solve. So you take that one and you break it up into. And you just keep this going until you have what physicists will call a well defined problem. And that means something very specifically, which means it's a problem you know how to solve for the most part. Right?

In principle.

Yeah, right, exactly. Exactly.

Right.

And so this is the same. We need to take that and we need to bring it to our social element of development, of building. And, and I really appreciate that question because all of this can get really lost in, in the abstract, high level language. But what does it really look like to be inclusive? What does it really mean? And for me, it means surrounding myself with as many people who have not been traditionally engaged with or been able to come into the field and work together. Not because it's a matter of, oh, boohoo, we got to help everybody. It's this, this is, this is the competitive group and this is who's going to learn how to be innovative in the space and how to transition into the space from a place where not just, not just they weren't in quantum before, but that they didn't have a clear path to get into quantum. It was like impossible from where they were sitting to get in. So if we can figure out how to navigate that and include everyone there, the rest comes in a sense for free in the math sense.

So we have an audience question that sounds like it's coming from a person who is interested in, to start studying quantum. And so the question is related to the backloaded mathematical concepts. So they're curious. What are some of these mathematical concepts that tend to be the most challenging for new students? And so maybe I would also sort of rephrase that question. So how would one front load appropriately so that someone who is thinking about getting into this, but maybe worried about some of those mathematical formalisms and oh, well, what do I need to know? Do I not need to know? So what are, what are the things that you instead want to start with in terms of applications or, you know, fundamental concepts that then inform how you pick up these.

Yeah, so can I just, can I take that, Russell? So if you, I think you have it almost, you know, you started out by saying, well, I'm interested in getting into quantum. So you're over the Hump there. Right. The reason it's so and I'm not saying you don't have to learn about careers and impacts and the concepts first. Those are the three principal ways in which we invert. So I think it is important you read some articles that at a high level describe how Quantum will affect all industries, especially the ones that you care about. All academic disciplines, especially the ones that you care about. All hobbies and interests, especially the ones.

That you care about.

So you know, tying to your interest, tying to careers, that's an evidence based practice. We've known change the conversation and indicated that especially for women, the messaging that you need to recruit people effectively is that advanced study in this field, continuing in this field has the opportunity to work in teams, to change real people's lives, to solve real problems, to provide a flexible, wide ranging opportunity for you career wise. So if you've already checked those boxes for yourself, then I'd say dive into the mathematical material that seems accessible to, to you and where you start to get frustrated. Back up to the touchstones that I just mentioned. Why is this so important to society? What are the career opportunities I'm really trying to create for myself and how does it lead to other academic disciplines? I'm going to make it really concrete because see you're, you're starting interested. What about the students that aren't starting interested? So I'm going to give an example of something I saw in someone's class. This is not a QST member institution and I intend it as a bad example of what to do somebody that has not thought about carefully about who their audience is and how. So I'm not going to name the professor of the institution. But this is very widely available material that hopefully becomes like replaced with something that's more accessible. And the example is a player running across a field with a lacrosse stick. And, and the field is rough and their running is rough. So there's sort of small noise and big noise and they affect. One way they do that is by rocking the lacrosse that they hold the ball is by rocking the lacrosse stick back and forth. And so that's a bit like dynamical decoupling and is a good metaphor. But how many people know how to know what that means? Unless you got the lacrosse stick in front of them, it's not accessible. And even if you do have the lacrosse stick in front of them, you're not tying to their interests. Right. So if you Google like just do see what the intensity like Google trends, the intensity of Google searches on lacrosse that's a great thing to use in Wisconsin. Do it in Wisconsin.

This is actually a trap that I think many so thinking of educators who are just learning how to be educators, this is a common trap where you choose an application that's sort of a non application, right.

Or skews really. Skewing towards Star wars is known to skew towards boys. Skewing towards constructive video games is known not to have a gender bias. And depending on the video game you can even get a positive bias towards women who are underrepresented in stem. And therefore on a justice basis, I would argue that's a, that's a skew worth making. You know, no matter what specific examples you use, you're not going to hit all your students. So use diverse examples. Try to tie it into what you, you've discovered about your students. Those are the things that I think we need to do to expand the number of women, the number of people of color in Quantum. And so I've given one idea about lacrosse, you know, that's so Russell really mentioned five different strategies. So one is inclusive materials, you know, and it's not just about coloring up materials. It's. It's actually about redefining the breadth of interest. A second one is careers and impacts. That's the change the conversation evidence. A third one is building community in your classroom. That's the culturally responsive pedagogy piece where you let students engage on their areas of expertise first. And another is near peer mentoring. So like for instance, NC A&T has quantum scholars. They took the 30 best students that were interested and gave them stipends and they meet with them. They're taking a series of classes. They were already doing vqe, the variational quantum eigensolver, you know, to solve energy levels of a molecule by the end of freshman year. And, and they meet on Saturdays. They have an industry mentor, they have near peer mentors. So if you want, you know, it'd be great to find some graduate students or upper undergraduate students who are women and approach them and say, you know, if that's a problem on your campus to get a diverse gender wise, if that's the demographic you're struggling with, I'd start by recruiting some specific undergraduates and then, you know, have them recruit their friends. You can use clubs that skew towards women. It's known having a puppy at a recruiting table is it, it skews more than any other effect. I know. So, you know, we'll come to your campus and set up the Q steam table. With, you know, interactives and, and swag and, and if you want us to, we'll talk to a local pet store and have a puppy there. That is something they do. And it, it does change who stops at the table. So I'm, I'm not saying, you know, the J in Jedi, justice, equity, diversity, inclusion is important. And I appreciate Russell's point that this is really about what works. And because of the workforce and national security issues, we got to reach everybody because, you know, if you recruit diverse people, you get a better product. That's all true. But I also think that there's a justice perspective here that we need to not inherit the exclusive anti women, anti people of color culture from physics, computer science, and electrical engineering. Those are three of the most uncomfortable disciplines. As an undergraduate at mit, I actually had two students stand up in a quantum lecture at the junior level and walk out of the lecture hall because MIT had hired the second woman in the physics department and she was teaching the class. It's unacceptable, and it's not that long ago. And the only way to change it is on purpose with the community. So an example is the Math Alliance. Graduate mentorship of math students. People outside of math. Those professors in physics have never heard of the Math alliance, and they need to, because this isn't, It's a great example. And what you do is you don't work with people that don't want to work with you. You're never going to convert. The, the campus that wants to make calculus a prerequisite for their very introductory quantum course, forget them. They're not trying. Work with the campuses that are ready to, to recruit a diverse workforce, because that is not only the better thing to do for all kinds of reasons, it's also the right thing to do.

And I appreciate that because, you know, everyone picking your battles, and you know, I, I'm, I'm, I'm always picking every battle. So I kind of do want to focus on the fact that you don't need to accept or buy into the justice piece to really buy into the diverse competitive piece. However, man, do I appreciate.

Yeah, and I'm in Iowa, where actually, if, you know, if you, if you have DEI in your, in your job title, you just lost it. You know, it's the political situation makes it a little dicey because people mishear what you mean, right. When you say justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion. Now they think that that's something bad. And I, I guess I, you know, I had one student. Well, I think I won't tell that on A live stream. But you know, we need, we need to get dialogue going so that people can understand that this is a win, win situation here. By doing things that are good for students who would otherwise feel excluded by what you were going to do. Instead by changing it, you're doing something that's good for all of your students and for the workforce and for the products that come out of the workforce. And nobody's trying to take a job from white men. That's not what's happening here.

That's. Yeah.

And so in terms of concrete ways to work together, it sounds like things like hackathons, things like internships for students that are looking for industry experience, summer programs. So if you're, you know, if you're out there and wondering, you know, what are some programs throughout there definitely look up all the offerings that QSTEAM has to offer and anything that's going on in the greater Chicago Quantum Exchange as well as I would be remiss if I didn't mention our summer program as well, which, you know, you're welcome. International students also more than welcome to apply for that. We love to have a group from all over the world studying interesting problems. And so in terms of, you know, hackathons and you know, industry internships and these sorts of things, I think we're nearly out of our scheduled time for the livestream. If there's any other audience questions, do be sure to get those in so that we can make sure to ask, ask our guests. But so I was hoping that we could also talk a little bit more about so specifically at these kind of hackathon or. Well, so let's maybe make this a two part question. So one is, you know, hackathons in these more sort of informal learning spaces and the other would be, you know, internship. So what are some things that make both of these successful in your experience.

With hackathons? I think having diverse. So at the cqe we are really fortunate to be. Well, I mean it's by design we, we engage with industry, national, the government national labs and academic institutions. And the hackathons are really amazing and the diverse people brings to the table and that they're focused on projects that are defined by industry professionals. And so but then at the same time there's split up. The hackathons are split up into technical portion and business development portions. And so that just really expands the number of people that can be involved and the kinds of problems that you can work on and, and really cross pollination to develop innovative, you know, approaches.

To even we didn't hit the entrepreneurial belt nearly enough.

We should emphasize that.

Incorporate entrepreneurialism into courses.

Exactly.

And start out with the mindset that there are problems that people have not identified, let alone thought about the solutions. And you can scale that and impact people at scale and that we need to teach how to develop like just.

The big one day of entrepreneur, that hackathons are perfect for this. And then the entrepreneurial piece is when we are developing this into courses as well. But I think that like Ben is saying that really the hackathons are an amazing place to bring all of this together because a, it's a place where you're getting all kinds of people coming in from zero point, starting point, but then also super experienced experts in the field and everyone in between. And, and at the same time you. So they have to come in, you have to accelerate them. Right. And this is a quick thing. So you have to be able to crash course to help crash course content. So there's quantum education involved, you have to have it. And then there's the fact that you have. So, so for that we have games. And, and part of what I think impact a thons could really leverage is quantum games game theory in general and using that collaborative space to bring these different types of people together to work and think on these types of problems. And then at the same time having the pitch competition, having the diverse types of problem sets you know, worked on, all feed into this accelerated. So it's like putting everything in a pressure cooker. And so there's, there's definitely the slow cook and you could throw in your crock pot and. Right. And that's great. But then you can throw it into your pressure cooker and it's going to be a different type of meal.

Right.

It's gonna be a different type of everything. And so that's what I think these hackathons are great for. Really high intensity engagements that lead to sustained impact over time because of the connections that are made, not necessarily because of what all happens on that day. I, I don't think anybody is really like won the Nobel Prize out of a hackathon last I checked. But the reality is they're super helpful. And at bare minimum, even if a technical solution didn't, you know, get presented that no one else has come up with before, you have new connections and you have a new way of approaching these problems that you didn't before. And that's exactly the kind of thing innovation and that entrepreneurial spirit we need in, in the space to progress and then in the, in the, in the course room classroom. Ben, you want to chime in?

The second half of the question was about the industry mentorships or.

Yeah, I think you were saying push that to a different time.

Well, so if either of you would like to chime in on that because, I mean, you know, obviously industry partners also have their opinions on what tends to make for successful partnerships in terms of finding good projects for students who are coming in from a undergraduate research opportunity or even a student, as you mentioned. You know, one thing that I really appreciate about what, what we do oftentimes, especially with our summer programs, is that no matter where you are in terms of your official credentials, if you're interested to work in problems, you know, by all means apply and let us know what you're passionate about. And you know, you know, if it's a good fit for something that is a problem that, you know, we're also having, then that, that's a great place to collaborate, sort of no matter what the prior training is, as long as someone is eager to work on something, that usually works out well.

Absolutely. And as a matter of fact, one of the things qsteam is working to develop is that network, right? The professional network, and exactly these kinds of connections. And in large part we want to model it after this amazingly fantastically successful program we're hoping to get renewed at some point. But it's called the Kiznet program. It's housed, well, it started at Harvard kind of, but it's house at the Chicago Quantum Exchange at the University of Chicago. And what this does is gives a triplet of participants, the, a graduate student, their, their PI and an industry partner or national lab researcher funding for a certain, you know, a couple years or you know, whatever it is, a few years to engage on exactly what you're talking about, a collaboratively defined project that serves exactly that purpose. And the, the output of this program is that I saw in helping manage this for, for the couple years when it was going on. I mean, don't quote me on this, but I can only remember of like two. I mean really, I remember one in particular, but maybe two or three individuals that went on to a postdoctoral fellowship actually that were in this program. And there's a lot of individuals that went to this program because they all got amazing opportunities in industry. Right? So, so now you are bringing research and you're cross pollinating and that is exactly the kind of thing. And, and one of them started his own company. Everybody heard of it, it's called Q Braid. We were Just on it. All right, so Kismet brings you Q Brave at the end of the day, right? That's what you get. So he was working with IBM and he went with Google and he was at Dartmouth with, you know, J.D. whitfield. And then with U.S. history, he was like, I want to do this, this platform. And, and now here he is in Chicago renting out space downtown. Got too big for the space here in the cqe, you know, and so now they're like renting real expensive space downtown. And so this is how we do it. And we bring more people in that are different, diverse and include more types of people as much as possible. And at the end of the day you're going to see a really amazing community that then kicks out more opportunities because people know how to leverage unique non traditional opportunities. So that's something that I can do because I'm a unique non traditional individual that has that experience. And so I can do things that other people haven't really thought of because well, I've done this. I've seen people that I've seen this done. I know this will work. And so we bring in new ideas and strengthen our ecosystem.

Yeah, one of my colleagues was lucky enough to visit those QBRAID offices recently. You know, kind of, if you're listening, we'll definitely have to have you on for a live stream as well sometime.

Soon saying, you know, it's amazing, amazing company. We're big fans of Q Braid, big supporters and also Wolf from Man. You know, like I said, I. It's. It's absolutely essential for me to be online and to be able to move between my notebook and writing it out by hand and showing them and then sending them the, the notes right afterwards to being able to just define the, the, the states. So you know, we have our one cubit states, then we define, right. The, the Hadamard gates and some basic elementary operations and for two cubit states and our CNOT gate on them. And this just really, you know, the control Z right on this. We need these gates for Grovers. We need these gates as fundamental gates and so we can really leverage simple tools to do powerful education.

So one related question to that actually. So as I said, if you're in the audience and have any questions, we're nearing the amount of time that we have, so make sure that you get those in. But one sort of maybe hopefully not too much in the weeds question, but this is something that I'm kind of curious about is so you were just mentioning in a lot of the examples that we've been talking about use sort of the digital approach to quantum computing. There is some really exciting stuff going on in the analog hardware world too. I'm curious your own just thoughts about for educational purposes what are, what are some places that you choose to use either gate based formalism versus talking about analog systems or what are some of your thoughts there? Just briefly as we're waiting for our last audience questions to come in.

Yeah, so where we choose as far as we being qsteam, I want to make it clear that we actually aren't making those choices. So it's different at every campus. There are campuses that really emphasize continuous wave and what we do choose in our materials is to aim for a balance a across a wide variety of, of cubit platforms as well as a direction in the curriculum. There are people that race towards quantum networking, quantum communications. There are people that race in an introductory course towards quantum cryptography, quantum sensing. So depending on the application and you choose the application based on the strengths of your campus, based on the student interest, based on the community that your campus is situated in, in terms of employers that's gonna, you know, if you're interested in quantum sensing and squeeze states then, then the, the model of a two state system that's just, I mean it's just you, you. I don't think that there's one answer to any question in that direction. But it is important that every course introduces a large context across sectors, across disciplines. And what you just mentioned is a great example of how you can create blind spots by not pulling back to the big picture. So you know.

Yeah, so I just want to jump in real quick with some of this time because what I think we want to answer is that it's essential to have hands on experience to really get trained in this field. That is a huge barrier right now to for inclusion. So it's not a requirement. Just like it's wonderful if a student has linear algebra, if they take an abstract algebra, have you take, you know, if I've taken a class on operator algebra even hey awesome. We could really start talking right? So that's all wonderful and that's great but it's not necessary as I think what we want, what we're trying to say is that you can go, we try to, we work with, we meet people where they're at and so institutions that don't have the ability to get Q Tools equipment or remotely access the Q Tools equipment to one of our partners that we have right now, like one only at UChicago but what we're doing at Q STEAM is applying for grants. We're working with University of Illinois Chicago and Wilbur Wright, University of Puerto Rico myos to get, get more equipment, Q Tools equipment which is remotely accessible. So we do have course three, I'm sorry, of course four in our minor that Bennett had showed and that is a lab course. So what we mean by minor as well, let me rephrase, you know, give context. We are not a accredited body institution, so we don't give degrees and we don't have exactly mine. What we do have is curriculum. And we have again a network and partners at, and founding members at institutions that are creating these programs within their own institution. Chicago State is developing and running through curriculum, you know, committees, your curriculum and things that we've developed, we're developing and obviously OSU has done this other places. And so U of I, University of Illinois, Champaign, Urbana. So these are all, this is the process. So the first process is to get the curriculum, test it out, get it better, have institutions adopt it, pilot it, and then apply for permanent course status and permanent minor, you know, program implementation. And so we're in that whole process of getting everyone, you know, engaged and getting these minors stood up as a part of the minor structure is that it's starts at the zero level, if you will, where community colleges are engaged and you can do the first four core courses at a community college. And so one of the ways that we're looking to do this with Wilbur Wright is establish remote equipment with University of Illinois Chicago that they owe money for and they have already purchased and they're waiting for the equipment from Q Tools right now. And so they're setting up a remotely accessible lab at the University of Illinois in Chicago and will be right and other places. And so we want to get more equipment that would then be at Chicago State and will be right to then broaden excess and provide more nodes that other institutions can then access remotely, including University of Puerto Rico. And so we want to build this scaling effect so that people do have access to real hands on equipment. Even if they're accessing it remotely and tweaking the motor on the stage. It's still a real experiment they're running. They're still getting the results, real results. But we want to minimize access to this right now. And we're not relying on only access to that for our program to succeed. So we're looking at lower cost equipment, getting classical analogs in the hands of students, even remotely, and then dial in to do the more Sophisticated single qubit, single photon experiments. And yeah, and these are things that play across, like Ben was saying, all fields. So quantum optics, we use it for quantum computing, quantum sensing, and so there's communication networks and so Q Tools platform is a really wonderful hands on platform to really jump off of and connect any of the fields.

So this is a great point that you bring up, which is that when we're talking about hands on experience, you know, whether, whether you're giving instructions to the equipment from like the other side of one door from the clean room or you know, the next building over on the same campus or actually from an entirely different geographic location, that's basically the same process. And so, you know, having now and you know, there's economic challenges with making some of this very specialized hardware, you know, physically present at every location where you might want it. So this new way of allowing people to get actual access to experimental hardware while the experimental hardware might not be physically located where they are, is a really exciting thing that, you know, I sometimes wonder what courses I took would have been like, let's say 20 or 30 years ago if that had been part of the paradigm that now is something which I find really personally exciting.

I mean, my dream would be in the future that phones and Oculus type virtual reality setups become so ubiquitous that computers are no longer exactly required. And you're getting everything off of servers for the most terminal model. Right. And we can have really interactive digital experiences where you're able to manipulate the experiments in a more analog human interface level. But you're still having this. So you can train people, they can do things in person, but at the same time have the effect we were just talking about, about John. I mean, that would be a dream, right?

Yeah. To spell out his point E there. You know, how, how can we make these very expensive? I mean an SPDC setup is expensive just itself. And then if you want to do anything with it, you need detect. I mean it's, it can be pricey.

So Chicago State, I brought a Q SPD setup. Right.

So I know, yeah, so we have a number of different solutions for that. And, and Russell mentioned all of them. But I think it's a really important point to enumerate them and to mention that we don't actually know how important it is to provide, you know, the gold standard of two students on or three students on a piece of equipment that they have right in front of them with on site instruction. So, you know, is it as valuable to have a piece of equipment that rotates among campuses I have a quantum coffer here which, that's an expensive piece of equipment. I just retrieved it from one campus and then bringing it to another campus providing a training, you know, the, so rotating equipment, a quantum trailer. That's, that's one option. Sharing equipment in a different way but where the equipment doesn't move is another option. A hub and spoke where maybe the faculty come at first to the Central R1 Research University or, or larger institution and, and then they're followed later by students. So that's another model. Another model is to just completely virtualize it like V that I posted in the chat there. That's a. There is no physical thing anywhere. It's a complete mathematical simulation. And there are things in that category like sequence is a tool for simulating quantum communication that we've worked with a team at Argonne National Lab to work into a curriculum module. Another is to have physical equipment but access it remotely like octant from inflection. We've worked with them to, to provide time on that quantum computer to institutions that want to use it. Another is to virtualize the experience more than you know, command line code or nice visualizations. But to have the real equipment on webcam and that you schedule a time kind of like the Intel FPGA network we have that we have entanglement demonstrations you can reserve remote desktop time on. And they're based at the University of Chicago. We. There's also, you know, a virtual presence that Russell alluded to there of, of stereoscopic pictures in a physical environment and an experience as though you're there, maybe even haptically, you know, some very future futuristic implementation. So. And then there are strategies that blend those, of course. But I just, I want to mention how important it is, you know, that we solve that problem in particular and research the effectiveness of our solutions. Solutions. Because ultimately, you know, I don't know, we're at time. So I'm trying to provide my last words anyway.

Sure.

We have a, a huge problem internationally as a species. How do we leverage this as well as nationally. How do we not get our butt handed to us on a silver platter? And that's. And the key problem of that is the bottleneck in the workforce in the United States. That is the limiting factor. That is the, the throttle is the workforce. And the way to solve that is by broadening participation by broadly implementing evidence based instruction across diverse campuses. And that if you want to solve that, that the only way to do so is by working together across departments, across institutions, across industry, academia and government. And nonprofits and being more open and collaborative than competitive IP environments are normally aiming to do. Because to support your private ip you need a workforce. And companies are joining QSTEIN because they're finding, hey, if we actually support use of our product, I mean, that's what everybody wants to do by sharing some of the central concepts that maybe we were more protected around even in a curriculum module and passing that through QSTEAM to diverse campuses, providing an internship position for a QSTEAM student, you know, it's going to take engagement between academia and industry and government's going to have to help because we cannot wait for the market to drive it.

And putting a specific. So you mentioned the Octant service for making quantum matter from inflection. So that as a specific example, that's one of the tools that if you're someone out there who's interested in doing this research on how effective is the pedagogy that we can develop by, let's say, creating a theoretical model of the system, running it on the actual hardware through that service, let's say, and then seeing, okay, did we get the learning outcomes that we were able for, do please reach out. I'm sure anyone here on this live stream would be more than happy to help try to facilitate your work and be potential collaborators on that. So, you know, for any of these questions that you mention, there is a lot of not only technical but also pedagogical work to do to figure out, okay, let's make sure that what we think is going to be effective in this realm is as effective as what our prior research would lead us to believe.

And my, my last word I really want is just a plea with the community. Exactly the kind you were saying. But to really make a plea, treat this as a research problem. This is a social problem. This is a bigger problem we're trying to navigate, not a well defined problem. I understand that, but treat it like a research problem. Treat it like it's that important as well. And, and you know, don't just give up on a few failed, if you will, or things that didn't go the way you thought they would and oh, well, this won't work, or it's just too much effort. It is a lot of efforts, believe me. If I, if anybody can understand and, and connect and relate to anybody who feels like this is just too hard every day I feel like that sometimes, you know, I mean, on some level, at some point, but I believe that if we come together, we bring everyone from every field, from every walk of life together we can put our heads together and really make progress here in a way that we couldn't have thought of before. And so treat it seriously, take this and commit to it and give your all to this space. Because this is the future, right? It's not just the future for our careers, the future for this country, it's the future for our kids. Look at what we're using right now. We're using Internet and we're using computers. When did this start? When did we develop these things? Right? But now it's important. So if we want our kids and our and their kids kids to have the best and have the opportunity to choose for themselves the best life, we have to start now. We have to invest now. Thank you.

And yeah, so as we get to the end of the time, our speakers probably have. Thanks so much for joining us. I'll take the prerogative here to inject one last audience comment, which was that they love the ability of platforms like Qbraid for easy interaction with GPUs. They love the ability of using Mathematica to do symbolic calculus. And so seeing a variety of these tools come together in interesting ways is something that our audience apparently likes. And so we like it too. So thank you for joining us and to. To both of our speakers, speakers Russell and Bennett, thank you so much for being here and it was a real pleasure talking to you both.

Thank you.

Thank you so much. Thank you everybody who's taking the time to watch this later or come now. Thanks for the questions and feel free to reach out. Thank you.

Yeah. Please engage.

Sa.