It was a tale of two cities. But it wasn’t the best of times and the worst of times.
It was only the best of times, having not one, but two, World Quantum Day events to go to here in Southern California, where HKA is headquartered.
First, Irvine. A trio from HKA went to Quantum City Irvine, an event quickly created by Ana V. Flores, a high school physics teacher and founder of Quantum Tesseract, whose mission is to teach quantum to high school students in Orange County.
With support from Farrah Khan, Chief Innovation Officer at Quantum e-Motion (and former Irvine mayor which is how I knew her originally), Ana assembled a hybrid mix of speakers, both onsite and calling in from Germany and Washington D.C. Attendance was light, but considering it is a first-time event and happened quickly, it was a good start. Seeing high school students excited about, and engaged with, quantum tech was inspiring.
Representatives spoke from companies near and far: Jannes Stubbeman, Aqora; Donn Silberman, Quantum Optics Institute of Southern California; Arian Vezvaee, Quantum Elements; Davien Graham, DiYnamo Labs; Jim Freericks, Georgetown University; Daniel Rodan Legrain, Qblox; and Diptanshu Sikdar, from the UC Irvine Quantum Computing Club.
With Irvine in our backyard, we look forward to the next local gathering.
Onward up the freeway to Pasadena, home of the Rose Bowl, the Rose Parade and, perhaps most relevant, home to Caltech and JPL. This event was much larger, organized by Qubits Ventures, one of the original quantum VC funds, based in SoCal, and the Institute for Quantum Information and Matter (IQIM) at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). Qubits Ventures Managing Director Nardo Manaloto lined up engaging speakers and panelists who spoke to students, early-stage founders, quantum professionals, and the broadly quantum curious.
The Caltech location added gravitas, and the speakers contributed everything from a Quantum 101 keynote to a panel focused on going from lab to market. Among the speakers were moderator Doug Finke, Global Quantum Intelligence (GQI); Marcia Brown, IQIM; Lin Yi, NASA JPL; Farzaneh Afshinmanesh, PINC; Hooman Mohseni, Northwestern University; and David Liebrandt, UCLA. HKA was a proud sponsor of this event.
Reflecting on the day, it was awesome to see World Quantum Day conversations taking place in Southern California. Our state has both giant and tiny quantum companies, plus major universities such as Caltech, multiple University of California campuses and USC, as well as institutions such as Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).
Within the United States are established quantum hubs that continue to grow, and new smaller hubs popping up every year. Despite its sprawling size, California is not yet an established quantum hub, but we can see that the motor is running with Quantum California, a state-led umbrella effort, and the SoCal Quantum Initiative, led by UCLA. It feels like it’s time for California to coordinate — and fund — and then take its place among the country’s thriving quantum hubs. We look forward to telling California’s quantum story.
April 14 is the BIG quantum day. But the time has come for every day to be Quantum Day.
