Bob Sutor: What Must we do to Make Quantum Computing Practical?

Quantum computing has gotten tremendous attention over the last half-decade. Who wouldn't want a revolutionary type of computing that promises to bring new advantages for AI and machine learning, optimization and simulation for financial services, and natural and efficient calculations for natural processes like chemistry? Yet, despite all this buzz, we are a long way from what we need. While we estimate that we will require hundreds of thousands to millions of quantum bits, or qubits, to do this work, the largest systems today have slightly more than 100 qubits. How will we scale? What are the barriers and opportunities? In this talk, we’ll discuss the state of the art and what we are doing to accelerate progress.

Bob Sutor has been a technical leader and executive in the IT industry for over 30 years. Bob's industry role is to advance quantum technologies by building strong business, partner, technical, and educational ecosystems. The singular goal is to evolve quantum to help solve some of society’s critical computational problems. Bob is widely quoted in the press, delivers conference keynotes, and works with industry analysts and investors to accelerate the understanding and adoption of quantum technologies. More than two decades of Bob's career were spent in IBM Research in New York. There he worked on or led efforts in symbolic mathematical computation, optimization, AI, blockchain, and quantum computing. He was also an executive on the software side of the IBM business in areas including middleware, software on Linux, mobile, open source, and emerging industry standards. Bob is a theoretical mathematician by training, has a Ph.D. from Princeton University, and an undergraduate degree from Harvard College. He’s the author of a book about quantum computing called Dancing with Qubits, published in late 2019. He is also the author of the 2021 book Dancing with Python, an introduction to Python coding for classical and quantum computing.