Talia Gershon is responsible for driving initiatives that maximize the impact of IBM Research on their company, including transforming the way researchers define and deliver their work, defining a technology outlook that shapes the future of the company, and incubating and accelerating select emerging technology and business opportunities to their next phase of growth.

HPCwire: Congratulations, Talia. Even though a useful quantum system is still years away, the technology has so much potential that it commands a lot of attention, including, of late, skepticism. What do you make of the criticism that quantum will never work due to the scale of error correction involved?

In October of last year, my colleague Dr. Sergey Bravyyi and other collaborators, published Quantum Advantage with Shallow Circuits, which was the first ever mathematical proof that even near-term “noisy” quantum computers have the potential to solve certain problems faster than classical computers, which will guide the development of future quantum algorithms.

Think back to the 1950s, when classical computers were in their early days, and put yourself in the thinking of the day. No one could have imagined the impact that those machines would have on society. We believe we’re entering into a similar era now with quantum computing. Now is the time to get “quantum ready” and explore what we can do with quantum computers across any number of potential application areas and industries.

Quantum computers and classical computers will work together for the foreseeable future. For example, quantum computers are accessed via cloud computing, and we need classical computers to interpret the results of algorithms run on quantum computers.

Within the next five years, IBM believes that the capabilities of quantum computing – alongside classical computers – will reach beyond the research lab. That point will be marked by a “quantum advantage” for solving certain kinds of problems.