Get Full Government Meeting Transcripts, Videos, & Alerts Forever!
IBM fellow details quantum progress, warns of encryption risks and urges higher-education workforce planning
Summary
IBM fellow Ray Harishankar told a Midwestern Higher Education Compact audience that quantum computing is maturing—showing industry wins in finance and chemistry—while urging higher-education programs and two‑year pathways to prepare a workforce and to adopt post‑quantum cryptography ahead of projected risk timelines.
Ray Harishankar, an IBM fellow at IBM Research, told a Midwestern Higher Education Compact audience that quantum computing has moved from laboratory demonstrations to practical, industry-led experiments and that colleges should expand curricula and pathways to meet growing workforce needs.
"Our mission statement is we bring useful quantum computing to the world and to keep the world quantum safe," Harishankar said, framing both application opportunities and the security challenge posed by quantum advances.
Harishankar described how qubits—quantum bits that can represent values between 0 and 1—enable different algorithms than classical computers, calling out superposition, entanglement and interference as the physics that power those algorithms. He illustrated the information-scaling effect of qubits, noting that 49 qubits reach the representational power of top supercomputers and that IBM's Heron processor currently runs at 156 qubits.
He cited commercial and research milestones to show practical use cases:…
Already have an account? Log in
Subscribe to keep reading
Unlock the rest of this article — and every article on Citizen Portal.
- Unlimited articles
- AI-powered breakdowns of topics, speakers, decisions, and budgets
- Instant alerts when your location has a new meeting
- Follow topics and more locations
- 1,000 AI Insights / month, plus AI Chat
