South Carolina Quantum Computing Program Sees Success With USC Students’ Project
COLUMBIA — University of South Carolina seniors studying finance and computer science were the first participants in a taxpayer-funded initiative to train Palmetto State students on a quantum supercomputer for future high-tech, high-paying jobs. Jordan Fowler, of Charleston; Carter Burns, of Raleigh, North Carolina; and Jack Oberman, of Irmo, were part of a $20,000 research […] University of South Carolina students Jordan Fowler, Carter Burns, and Jack Oberman were the first participants in a taxpayer-funded initiative to train Palmetto State students on a quantum supercomputer for future high-tech, high-paying jobs. The initiative, funded by a $20,000 research project funded by the newly formed South Carolina Quantum Association, uses a portion of the money to rent time on a University of Maryland quantum computer. The association is looking for five to seven other South Carolina companies that may benefit from quantum computing access. The students used their data analysis and computing skills to improve retirement investment strategies for a Columbia-area bank they declined to identify. They also applied their knowledge to a small hedge fund they founded, Shaw Circle, which they hope to use to grow their business and attract more investors from around the Southeast and Southeast. The Quantum Association hopes to increase their size to $25 million and $50 million.
Published : a month ago by Jessica Holdman in Science
This article was originally published in South Carolina Daily Gazette.
COLUMBIA — University of South Carolina seniors studying finance and computer science were the first participants in a taxpayer-funded initiative to train Palmetto State students on a quantum supercomputer for future high-tech, high-paying jobs.
Jordan Fowler, of Charleston; Carter Burns, of Raleigh, North Carolina; and Jack Oberman, of Irmo, were part of a $20,000 research project funded by the newly formed South Carolina Quantum Association. The trio used quantum computing to improve retirement investment strategies used by a Columbia-area bank they declined to identify.
Now the Quantum Association is looking for five to seven other South Carolina companies with mountains of data to sift through that may benefit from quantum computing access. The association will then pair those companies with university students and researchers to come up with industry solutions while turning students into specialists of this next-era technology through hands-on training.
Get stories like these delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for The 74 Newsletter
The association, funded through a $15 million earmark in the state budget, is using a portion of that money to rent time on a quantum computer that’s housed at the University of Maryland but accessed through a web portal in the nonprofit’s office in Columbia’s Five Points.
The quantum computer can solve in minutes complex calculations involving vast numbers of data points that would take years using a standard computer.
In the case of the USC students, they ran simulations to determine what the best investments would be for a person seeking to retire by a certain age. Those simulations account for everything from weather patterns to war and the impacts those things have on publicly traded companies, according to the association’s organizer, Joe Queenan.
In working on the project, the students used rented time on the out-of-state computer while being coached by the association’s experts. In the end, the bank will benefit from a new, complex investment model not currently available to most banks in the region.
With their new-found data analytics and computing skills, the USC students took part in The Massachusetts Institute of Technology iQuHack Hackathon competition last month, facing off against 300 other students and earning a third-place finish.
Their next goal is to apply what they have learned to a small hedge fund that two of the students in the group founded, called Shaw Circle. They want to grow their business and carve out careers for themselves in the financial sector.
“We’ve got students from the Darla Moore School of Business who went to MIT and competed against several national teams on a level that we’re just not used to around here,” said Sen. Dick Harpootlian, who sponsored the $15 million earmark approved in the state budget last year.
The Columbia Democrat championed the effort as an economic development investment in the state’s “intellectual capital.”
“These are the best and the brightest,” Harpootlian said of the USC students. “They demonstrated that given access to a quantum computer and given access to this technology, students in this state can excel.”
It’s Harpootlian’s hope that, when these students graduate in the spring, they will stay in Columbia as they seek to grow their hedge fund business.
According to the students, quantum computing could allow them to simultaneously analyze trillions of investment combinations to find the most profitable.
“We now have access to a larger amount of data, and we’re able to crunch that to make better informed decisions for ourselves and our investors,” Burns said.
Rather than taking hours on a standard computer, they’re receiving training on how to use a quantum computer to get their calculation time down to minutes, Fowler added.
The students have largely invested on behalf of friends and family willing to contribute to their fund, Burns said.
“Now it’s time to get some real capital into it, hire some bright minds and grow it,” Burns said. “We want to bring opportunities to people in the South.”
They hope to bring in investors from around the Southeast and increase their fund’s size to between $25 million and $50 million. Having the added benefit of quantum computing skills could make their small team more successful when it comes to picking the best deals for their clients, allowing them to compete even when up against larger investment firms, they said.
Supporting student groups like this one is just one portion of what the quantum association hopes to accomplish.
Later phases of the state-funded initiative involve designing a quantum computing specialty degree program that colleges across the state could replicate.
At least one of those will be offered at a historically Black college in South Carolina. Organizers also want to launch an online training academy for workers looking to transfer into a high-tech career.
SC Daily Gazette is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. SC Daily Gazette maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Seanna Adcox for questions: [email protected]. Follow SC Daily Gazette on Facebook and Twitter.
Topics: Academia, USC