FACULTY FOCUS Peter Wittek
In September of 2019, Rotman Assistant Professor Peter Wittek went missing during a mountaineering expedition in the Himalayas, after being caught in an avalanche. Peter was a valued member of the Rotman community and his loss is keenly felt. We are honoured to end this issue on Creative Destruction — a topic Peter was passionate about — with his final interview, which took place in July of 2019.
You oversee the Creative Destruction Lab’s Quantum stream, which seeks entrepreneurs pursuing commercial opportunities at the intersection of quantum computing and machine learning. What do those opportunities look like?
Peter Wittek: We’ve been running this stream for three years now, and we were definitely the first to do this in an organized way. However, the focus has shifted slightly. We are now interested in looking at any application of quantum computing.
These are still very early days for quantum computing. To give you a sense of where we are at, some people say it’s like the state of digital computing in the 1950s; but I’d say it’s more like the 1930s. We don’t even agree yet on what the architecture should look like, and as a result, we are very limited with respect to the kind of applications we can build.
As a result, focusing on quantum is still quite risky. Nevertheless, so far we have had 45 companies complete our program. Not all of them survived, but a good dozen of them have raised funding. If you look at the general survival rate for AI start-ups, our record is roughly the same — and given how new this technology is, that is pretty amazing.
What are the successful start-ups doing? Can you give an example of the type of problems they’re looking to solve?
At the moment I would say the main application areas are logistics and supply chain. Another promising area is life sciences, where all sorts of things can be optimized with this technology. For instance, one of our companies, ProteinQure, is folding proteins with quantum computers.
Finance is another attractive area for these applications. In the last cohort we had a company that figured out a small niche problem where they had both the data and the expertise to provide something new and innovative; they are in the process of raising money right now. The other area where quantum makes a lot of sense is in material discovery. The reason we ever even thought of building these computers was to understand quantum materials, back in the 1980s. Today, one of our companies is figuring out how to discover new materials using quantum processing units instead of traditional supercomputers.
We have a company called Agnostic, which is doing encryption and obfuscation for quantum computers. Right now IBM, Rigetti Computing and D-wave Systems are building quantum computers for individual users. They have access to everything that you do on the computer and can see all the data that you’re sending. But if you’re building a commercial application, obviously you will want to