Last year, the IBM Quantum team made history by hosting a free, virtual quantum computing crash course for over 4,000 learners. This year, we’re hoping to host another 4,000 students — now with a focus on quantum machine learning (QML).

This year’s Qiskit Global Summer School will feature two weeks of live lectures and hands-on laboratory sessions where students can apply what they’ve learned using Qiskit code using the new Qiskit machine learning application module. Lectures will begin with an introduction to quantum computing and simple quantum algorithms, before diving into the foundations of classical machine learning and understanding how these concepts translate to quantum computing. Students will then learn about and implement state of the art quantum machine learning algorithms on both simulators and hardware. The course will feature expertise from some of the top quantum computing researchers in the field.

The Qiskit Global Summer School is part of the IBM Quantum team’s mission to lowering quantum computing’s barrier-to-entry for students around the world. We designed the course material to be accessible to those with a working knowledge of programming in python and linear algebra.

As we were constructing this year’s course, we recognized that interest in quantum machine learning has skyrocketed among our community members. QML is an exciting, but often misunderstood branch of quantum computing applications. We hope that the QML-focused education path of this year’s summer school will demystify the topic, and leave students with an understanding of QML’s potential and limits as we review tangible applications grounded in state-of-the-art research and provide hands-on experience.

We hope that students will once again leave the Qiskit Global Summer School with the confidence to apply quantum computing concepts and to embark on a deeper quantum computing journey of their own. Last year, we received tons of positive feedback from our students, who recounted feeling motivated to continue studying quantum computing, being excited to join the quantum computing community, and getting ready to dive deeper into quantum research.

Registration will open on May 26, 2021 at 12:00 PM EST*.