Posted on 02/06/2007 3:18:20 PM PST by theFIRMbss
We are D-Wave Systems, Inc. The Quantum Computing Company. D-Wave is the world’s first — and only — provider of quantum computing systems designed to run commercial applications.
Please join us in February as we demonstrate a technological first: an end-to-end quantum computing system powered by a 16-qubit quantum processor, running two commercial applications — live.
For your convenience, we will host this event in two locations: Silicon Valley and, two days later, in Vancouver, B.C. near our home offices. We look forward to seeing you.
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BOARD
Haig Farris, LL.D., Chairman
Dr. Farris is one of Canada's most well known venture capitalists and experts in high-technology start-ups and turn-arounds, with a varied 30+ year history of involvement, commitment and management. A co-founder of D-Wave, he is the President of Fractal Capital Corp, a private venture capital company financing high technology start-ups and resource service technology companies.
Previously Dr. Farris was a co-founder and partner of the Ventures West Management group of venture capital funds (1972 - 1990), which continues to be the largest venture capital pool in Western Canada. In 2001, he received the British Columbia Technologies Industry Association's (BCTIA) Bill Thompson Award.
Herb Martin, Chief Executive Officer
Mr. Martin has twenty years experience as a chief executive of high technology companies. Starting his career as an electrical engineer, Herb progressed through executive positions in engineering, sales and marketing before undertaking his first position as chief executive of Mercator, a microcomputer company he founded. After merging Mercator with Onyx Systems, a publicly traded company, Mr. Martin ran the European operations of the combined entity before becoming the Onyx President and Chief Operating officer in San Jose, California. He was subsequently the President and Chief Operating officer of Wollongong Group where he led the company’s growth to become a leading internet software company providing products and services to major companies globally.
Subsequent to merging Wollongong with the Attachmate Corporation, Mr. Martin, who was then a director of ESS Technology, a publicly traded semiconductor company, became its President and Chief Operating officer. During his tenure at ESS, the company’s market capitalization increased by almost a billion dollars. Mr. Martin led the founding and growth of Salira Optical Network Systems, an optical networking company specializing in the provision of broadband services. Salira was eventually sold to Hitachi Communications Technologies, Ltd. and Hitachi, Ltd., after building a successful product line and customer base.
Mr. Martin brings to D-Wave extensive experience in growing companies to substantial revenues, developing profitable business models and building global channels and business partnerships.
Dr. Geordie Rose, Founder and Chief Technology Officer
Dr. Rose is a founder and CTO of D-Wave. He is known as a leading advocate for quantum computing and physics-based processor design, and has been invited to speak on these topics in venues ranging from the 2003 TED conference to Supercomputing 2005.
His innovative and ambitious approach to building quantum computing technology has received coverage in BC Business, The Vancouver Sun, Vancouver magazine, The Globe and Mail, The National Post, USA Today, MIT Technology Review magazine, the Harvard Business Review and Business 2.0 magazine, and one of his business strategies was profiled in a Harvard Business School case study. He has received several awards and accolades for his work with D-Wave, including being short-listed for a 2005 World Technology Award.
Dr. Rose holds a Ph.D. in theoretical physics from the University of British Columbia, specializing in quantum effects in materials. While at McMaster University, he graduated first in his class with a B.Eng. in Engineering Physics specializing in semiconductor engineering.
Since the inception of D-Wave in 1999, as founding CEO Dr. Rose raised over $45M on behalf of the company, including a round led by Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ), the first ever investment by a top-tier US venture capital firm in quantum computing.
Jeremy P. Hilton, Vice President, Technology
Mr. Hilton was previously Director of Intellectual Property and was responsible for managing the transfer of intellectual property from D-Wave's global collaborative network to Vancouver. In under three years, he grew D-Wave's Intellectual Property portfolio from 13 to 126 patents filed. Mr. Hilton has accepted several awards on behalf of D-Wave, including the 2003 British Columbia Technology Industry Association (BCTIA) award for "Most Promising Pre-Commercial Technology". He is a member of the Langara College Computer Science Program Advisory Committee and the BCTIA Research & Development Committee.
Dr. William Macready, Vice President, Product Development
Dr. Macready joined D-Wave from NASA's Ames Research Center where he was a Senior Research Scientist. At NASA, Dr. Macready nucleated a group in Machine Learning, and built intelligent algorithms for high performance scheduling, the automated design of satellite antennae, and learning algorithms for the automated extraction of knowledge from NASA satellite and deep space imagery.
Prior to joining NASA, Dr. Macready was Vice-President of Science and Research for Prowess Software and was responsible for the design and prototyping of a multi-dimensional matching engine for electronic marketplaces. Before that, he was Vice-President of Science, for BiosGroup, a Cap Gemini Ernst and Young funded consulting company applying complexity science advances to solving complex business problems. Dr. Macready has managed the delivery of numerous projects to Fortune 500 customers.
Dr. Macready holds a Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics from the University of Toronto and has over 30 peer reviewed publications in physics, machine learning, optimization, economics, and theoretical biology journals. Articles discussing the implications of his some of his work have appeared in “New Scientist” and “The New Yorker” magazines.
David Gillard, CGA, Vice President, Finance
Mr. Gillard brings over 15 years of financial experience to D-Wave, including 5 years with Stockgroup Media Inc., a publicly traded startup company that matured into a profitable enterprise while he was CFO. Prior to Stockgroup, he was a financial manager at Maynards Industries Ltd., a large asset sales organization. Mr. Gillard is a graduate of the British Columbia Institute of Technology and received his CGA designation in 1996.
Mr. Gillard’s community involvement includes a role as financial advisor to the Alzheimer Society of B.C., and he has participated in a well-known fund-raiser for the Society called the Ascent for Alzheimers.
Tanya J. Rothe, General Counsel & Director of Intellectual Property
Ms. Rothe holds a Bachelor of Applied Science in Chemical Engineering - Chemistry Honours and a Bachelor of Laws from the University of British Columbia. Following law school, Tanya was selected to clerk for Madam Justice McLachlin of the Supreme Court of Canada (now Chief Justice of Canada), and subsequently worked as an associate at Bull, Housser & Tupper, where she specialized in engineering and complex commercial litigation.
Prior to joining D-Wave, Tanya worked as Intellectual Property Counsel at Ballard Power Systems Inc., where she was responsible for managing a significant portion of Ballard's intellectual property portfolio, including all of the intellectual property developed by Ballard's US materials and electric drive and power conversion divisions. In 2003, Ms. Rothe obtained her designation as a registered patent agent.
Real? Yes
Useful yet? Not so much
How do you write logic for a machine that has 3 states?
(on, off, and maybe...)
Does this mean a .jpeg of my cat can both exist and not exist at the same time?
Technology: Quantum computers
Vancouver startup D-Wave Systems, however, aims to build a quantum computer within three years. It won't be a fully functional quantum computer of the sort long envisioned; but D-Wave is on track to produce a special-purpose, "noisy" piece of quantum hardware that could solve many of the physical-simulation problems that stump today's computers, says David Meyer, a mathematician working on quantum algorithms at the University of California, San Diego.
The difference between D-Wave's system and other quantum computer designs is the particular properties of quantum mechanics that they exploit. Other systems rely on a property called entanglement, which says that any two particles that have interacted in the past, even if now spatially separated, may still influence each other's states. But that interdependence is easily disrupted by the particles' interactions with their environment. In contrast, D-Wave's design takes advantage of the far more robust property of quantum physics known as quantum tunneling, which allows particles to "magically" hop from one location to another.
Incorporated in April 1999, D-Wave originated as a series of conversations among students and lecturers at the University of British Columbia. Over the years, it has amassed intellectual property and narrowed its focus, while attracting almost $18 million in funding, initially from angel investors and more recently from the Canadian and German governments, and from venture capital firms. The company plans to complete a prototype device by the end of 2006; a version capable of solving commercial problems could be ready by 2008, says president and CEO Geordie Rose.
The aggressiveness of D-Wave's timetable is made possible by the simplicity of its device's design: an analog chip made of low-temperature superconductors. The chip must be cooled to -269 °C with liquid helium, but it doesn't require the delicate state-of-the-art lasers, vacuum pumps, and other exotic machinery that other quantum computers need.
The design is also amenable to the lithography techniques used to make standard computer chips, further simplifying fabrication. D-Wave patterns an array of loops of low-temperature superconductors such as aluminum and niobium onto a chip. When electricity flows through them, the loops act like tiny magnets. Two refrigerator magnets will naturally flip so that they stick together, minimizing the energy between them. The loops in D-Wave's chip behave similarly, "flipping" the direction of current flow from clockwise to counterclockwise to minimize the magnetic flux between them. Depending on the problem it's meant to tackle, the chip is programmed so that current flows through each loop in a particular direction. The loops then spontaneously flip until they reach a stable energy state, which represents the solution to the problem. ...
Quantum Calculation - D-Wave Systems is building a 'quantum' computer to solve intractable real-world problems. The secret: cooling the chip to -269 C with liquid helium, MIT's Technology Review, July 2005
What is this? An Advertisement?
It's an announcment
from the company's website.
This seems to be real,
so it is big news
to those of us who follow
the computer world.
If it quacks like a duck, and waddles like a duck..........
Is it just me, or does this sound suspiciously like the Improbability Drive?
Does Zaphod know about this?
It's equally likely that you're not.
Only if your cat is inside a box with a hand gun aimed at it with the cover on.
lol!!
Bet it STILL won't run Vista.
Only if your real name is Erwin Schrödinger.
How about if it was in a hidden directory with the MSBlaster worm?
Yes, that would be the 21st century equivalent wouldn't it??? I like it.
I follow the "computer world" and it's not "big news".
Hmmmm....not sure about this one......
Hey, I've got some stock in the Philadelphia Experiment Inc I could sell ya, cheap. ;')
And it's free?
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