At the heart of this global race involving both public laboratories and private multinationals, the quantum computer, envisaged in the early 1980s by Richard Feynman, winner of the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physics, sparked a true revolution. However, amid promises and sensational announcements, it is difficult to know where this technology really stands, and what its actual applications will be. Unlike a classical computer and similar devices such as smartphones, a quantum system does not use binary bits, namely the two values of one and zero. It is based on qubits, which thanks to the unique properties of quantum objects, display an increasing number of different states with the addition of new units. Each extra qubit doubles computing power. However, this firepower is not adapted to all situations.
The European project AI-PROFICIENT (Artificial Intelligence for Improved PROduction efFICIEncy, quality and maiNTenance) is coordinated by the Université de Lorraine and is made up of a multidisciplinary consortium of 10 industrial and academic partners from France, Spain, Belgium, Greece, Finland and Serbia.
A cybersecurity partnership agreement will be signed on January 20th 2020 at the CISPA computer security research centre in Saarbrücken.
In December 2019, 40 French projects out of a total of 173 were awarded “Research and Teaching Chairs in Artificial Intelligence” following a call for projects launched by the French National Research Agency (ANR). Two projects are from the Lorraine region. Zoom in on Steve Kremer, Inria Research Director at the Loria, one of the selected projects’ coordinators.
