KATE WEBER: Good
morning, everybody.
As Ryan mentioned, my
name is Kate Weber.
I'm on Google's Government
Affairs and Public Policy team,
where I cover fundamental
research, including Google AI
Quantum.
I'm excited to be here
working with our Quantum team
as one of the most important
and exciting parts of my job.
And as I'm sure everyone
in this audience knows,
and as Ryan was
just reminding us,
quantum computing
is poised to reshape
our economy, health
care, security,
scientific discovery, and more.
And it's a strategically
important area
for Google and for the world.
So as a result,
policymakers and influencers
are very engaged in supporting
quantum computing research
and thinking about the
technology's potential impact
on society.
And I work with colleagues
to share Google's perspective
in those discussions, and also
to bring such discussions back
to our own work and
ensure we're considering
potential societal and
ethical implications as we
pursue our research.
So with that context,
it's my pleasure
to introduce the US Department
of Energy Undersecretary
for Science, Paul Dabbar, who
we're very excited to have
as today's keynote speaker.
Undersecretary
Dabbar oversees what
I think is DOE's most exciting
work, including, of course,
quantum computing.
In addition to quantum
other advanced computing,
he also oversees nuclear and
high energy particle physics,
basic energy sciences,
fusion, and biological and
environmental research.
And he manages a majority
of the DOE national labs,
as well as DOE's technology
commercialization activities.
Before joining DOE,
Undersecretary Dabbar
led a number of energy
business areas at JP Morgan.
And prior to that, he was
a nuclear submarine officer
in the navy, a job that included
deploying to the North Pole
to conduct environmental
research, which is super cool.
As you might gather
from his background,
Undersecretary Dabbar
is uniquely positioned
to understand and advance
the state of the art
in quantum computing, and
to consider the wide ranging
potential impacts of a
fault tolerant quantum
computer from research
to energy to security.
And he's been a
superb undersecretary
and a great partner to the
quantum computing community
and to Google.
We're particularly grateful
to Undersecretary Dabbar
for building opportunities for
public private collaboration
on quantum computing.
And we believe that such
collaboration is essential
for building and maintaining
a strong quantum computing
research ecosystem, and training
the next generation of quantum
scientists so that they're
equipped to take advantage
of state-of-the-art quantum
computing hardware so that we
can harness this
technology's full potential.
So without further
ado, I'll turn it over
to Undersecretary Dabbar.
Welcome, and thank you very
much for joining us today.
PAUL DABBAR: OK,
well thanks, Kate.
And it's much more
motivational to be
behind Emi and her
motivational words
than my typical
environment, which
is testifying before Congress
behind other dry speakers
asking for more money
and more programs
for quantum and other
areas of science.
It's delightful to be here
as part of this remote event.
When I was talking with
Helmut about this event when
I was in Santa
Barbara last, I was
very excited about being invited
by him and the Google team
here to talk about what we
see and what we've been doing,
and hopefully what
we're supporting on.
In the spirit of
American innovation,
obviously, it has been
a challenging time
of doing lab research
and work during the time
of the pandemic, while we
take our resources, in part,
and focus it on the
pandemic and solutions
that computing and
other areas that I'll
talk to you here that
quantum can certainly
be a future significant
support for.
And glad that everyone
here in this community
continues to drive forward
innovation in this area.
So as many of you may not be
aware, the Department of Energy
is the largest
supporter of Nobel Prize
winners in the world.
We support the majority of
Nobel Prize winners in physics
and 25% of all the Nobel
Prize winners of chemistry
get support and/or worked
at the DOE national labs.
And as a result
of that, but also
the history of the department,
for those of you that
may not know,
Department of Energy
is probably much misnamed.
Many people internally
like to call it
the Department of Exploration.
But the 17 national labs, we
have 60,000 researchers who
work at the 17 national labs.
It was started as an idea
by Albert Einstein in 1939
in a letter to President FDR.
And really, the founding
members of the Department
of the National Lab complex
included [INAUDIBLE] and more.
So speaking of a lot
of the ancient history
of the theoreticians and first
experimentalists in Quantum
were the founders
of the organization
that I'm a part of.
And if everyone has been
following, as a leadership
team for us in government
since we've been here
about 3 and 1/2 years, we have
been focusing significantly
on quantum investments,
which I'll get into.
But I'll tell you that when I
was doing my diligence before I
came into office, I was talking
with one of my predecessors,
who told me that quantum
technologies were still
a long ways off.
And I'm glad that
we're sitting here
today telling a different
story and discussing
a different story than at least
I was told by my predecessor--
one of my predecessors-- who had
a different view of this area.
As many of you
know, the department
focuses on basic
research programs,
not only in quantum, but
in a very broad range
of applications.
We work on helping
discover the Higgs Boson
research on anti matter and
the shape of the universe
are kind of normal,
everyday things that we do.
I was just at Fermilab
yesterday on neutrino science
and doing CP violation around
the formation of the universe.
But a lot of the technologies
and a lot of the science that
comes out of that basic
research have applications
and technology development in
quantum information science
and quantum information
technologies.
We've significantly increased
funding at the federal level,
I think, as people
generally know,
but I'll talk through
some of the specifics.
Around QIS and QIT for
the last 3 and 1/2 years.
We have, for example, in the
last year, a 66% increase
in grants to the
university systems
and in researchers
all around the country
for basic research in QIS.
And in all the areas of
the Office of Science,
we're doing different
research programs.
So it's not just in computing.
It's not just in
particle physics
or in basic energy
and materials.
It's literally
since we showed up,
every single area
of the sciences
has been focusing
new resources on QIS.
And the most interesting
one-- and I'll
talk about this a little
bit further-- cause
this is a very timely day
for us in the quantum realm,
that I'll be making a
number of announcements
on this video call that are new.
But one of the
interesting things
that we got out of Congress this
year is the first $25 million
to commence construction
and development of hardware
for the quantum internet.
And we're about to announce
the initiative of in Chicago
in an hour and a
half, which I'll
get into here in a little bit.
As many of you know, one
of the big initiatives
that ourselves, the president,
in a very bipartisan way,
Congress, launched the
National Quantum Initiative
by passing the National
Quantum Act Initiative Act.
That was a widely bipartisan
piece of legislation
that was passed about
a year and a half ago.
And it supports the industries
of the Future Initiative, which
is helping to push forward
technology in AI and 5G,
and also in bio, as well as in
quantum as part of a broad tech
push of additional dollars
and additional focus
that we've been bringing.
Our partners, the
other two agencies
that are a part of the
National Quantum Initiative,
is the National Science
Foundation, which is obviously
a great leader and a
partner of ours in funding
the sciences with a
great history of NSF Net,
if people go back to the
ancient history of the internet,
and the National Institute
of Standards, NIST.
And so the three of us
were the main beneficiaries
of the additional
dollars and support
for the National
Quantum Initiative.
That bill alone increased
quantum investments
by the federal government,
by $1.25 billion.
Just from that, on top of
all the other additional
investments.
I had to personally testify
before the Senate on QIS
in order to get this bill passed
and this additional dollars.
I very much enjoyed
discussing Schrodinger's Cat
before senators.
And I clearly had a number of
perplexed members of Congress
that we're asking questions
of the staff at the back,
going like, is that
Schrodinger's Cat thing like,
real?
And it reminds me of a quote
from Einstein about quantum
mechanics, in which he
said, the more successes
that the quantum theory
enjoys, the sillier it looks.
And having just got off a
phone call for an interview
with someone from the
Wall Street Journal,
we successfully
confused her, I think,
more as we got
through the interview.
So I think we were meeting
Einstein's standards here.
So we have been focusing on,
with International Quantum
Initiative, additional
dollars going out
the door to universities,
to stand up more university
programs.
And the National
Science Foundation just
announced three, two days ago.
One at University of
Illinois, one at UC Berkeley,
and one at University
of Colorado.
And so that was just announced.
For us, we're going to be
announcing five QIS National
Quantum Initiative
centers for research.
So we have the
various proposals that
have come in from consortiums
of academia, national labs,
and the private sector.
We look to announce that next
month of those five centers.
We had significant interest,
and we look forward
to working with those
groups that, once again,
what we pushed on for the
legislation is to make certain
that the department have a
request for proposals that
have that consortium
as a part of it.
Once again, private
sector, academia and labs,
really requiring that.
One of the other things
that I think people may not
realize about the
department is that we
are both an initial
investor in basic research
and, many times, we're the
first user of technology.
And in particular on
computing, DOE does that.
So we are the largest investor
in materials in the country.
We do lots of foundry work
in terms of fabrication
around materials.
But, the DOE
National Lab complex
is the first purchaser
of the next top end
supercomputer in the world.
And we have been for literally
decades since the Cray1.
And so, we have full teams
within our computing area,
which is out there to deal
with the private sector,
deal with Google,
deal with architecture
designers, different
microelectronics designers,
that when the industry
is able to jump
to a next level of
performance around computing,
we want to be the
first purchaser.
And not only be the
first purchaser, but as
part of us buying
that, we actually
co-invest for the research
to push the microelectronics
to the next level
of development.
And then we buy it.
And so we're the first purchaser
of first end computers.
And we are already
having discussions
around whether quantum
accelerators should
be part of the next
heterogeneous machine
that we're looking at building.
So it's not just CPUs and GPUs.
We're already talking
about how to we're
able to take this
sort of technology
and put it into the
next wave of computing.
And then finally, we're
the first user of it.
Not only do we buy
the machine, but we
think that the
research community
in quantum chemistry
and quantum materials
and obviously, very topically,
quantum level biology design,
are the first use for
quantum computing.
And so we, as obviously a
major funder and basic research
on that level of
research, we see
a first user need for quantum
computing as a first user.
Today, I'm at the
University of Chicago.
And we're going to be
announcing the launching
of the national blueprint
for the Quantum Internet.
This is an important day.
I'm going to be doing
that with the Secretary,
with President
Zimmer, the leaders
of several national labs,
the governor, mayor,
of announcing that.
Here's a little
bit of the history
of a lot of what we've done.
A few years back,
we were starting
to look at the development
around quantum repeaters
and fabrication around
single photon generators.
And obviously, at
the end of the day,
if you have a Cloud
computing system for quantum,
or distributed,
you're going to be
able to need to move
quantum data back and forth.
And so we looked at also
putting in dollars and research
around quantum communications.
And obviously, as
many people know,
the history of the current
internet was funded by DARPA
and funded by NSF, the original
four nodes at Santa Barbara,
at UCLA and so on.
That we decided that grew from
a grassroots organization.
And we thought that
it would probably
be good if there
was a principal who
had an interest
in driving quantum
networks, and ultimately,
leading to a quantum internet,
and developing the
technology and the software
stack to help drive the
quantum networks driving
towards a quantum
internet together.
So we decided back in
November that the original--
that the entity to help
push this forward of the 17
national labs.
We helped develop the
technology right now.
We're helping to
develop the stack.
And we have a use case to move
data back and forth from CERN
to Fermilab, or work
from Brookhaven to Slack.
And so, we convened in New
York, along with Google,
attended a workshop
to develop the plan
for the quantum network,
ultimately leading
to the quantum internet.
We had 50 different
organizations showed up
in February, 70
different people.
And over the last few
months, we developed
a plan that would lay out both
the application and hardware
stack and operating
system stack that
needs to be developed
to build this out,
and all the different hardware.
And then also, actually
how these networks
should be built out.
And we're publishing that today.
So I'm leaving this.
I'm telling you something that
we're about to go announce.
So I'm kind of
announcing it here today.
And we're very excited
about that case.
The second thing that
we're also doing here today
is that literally,
they're pushing Send,
or whatever they're
posting on their website.
Brookhaven National Lab
is announcing the second,
a new set of standards in
terms of quantum communications
through DOE.
And Brookhaven National Lab
has achieved transmission
of a single photon
level polarization
of qubits in a configuration
covering 140 kilometers.
And this is the longest
distance within that sort
of configuration ever
done in the world.
And it was using commercially
available telecom fiber
to provide entanglement.
So this is not dedicated.
We didn't lay it out ourselves.
We went out and got
commercial available fiber
to do the connection.
And proved that we could do
that with the commercial fiber
to do the entanglement.
We're very excited about the
Brookhaven and Stonybrook
team that accomplished
that today that we're
literally just announcing.
So that's a few things
that we're doing today,
launching the internet and
the plan for the country,
and announcement of Brookhaven
on their record setting
their quantum communications.
You know, we're very proud
to be part of this community
that I'm talking here today.
I see Peter Shor there.
So I very much appreciate.
Hopefully, we're supporting
the sort of things
that he's developed
over many years in many
of these different areas.
And so, we've been applying
additional dollars.
We've been applying
additional focus.
We've hopefully been
adding to leadership about,
and hopefully, that
we've been great partners
with academia and with
the private sector,
including Google.
And we look forward
to continuing
to drive that forward as
part of the community.
So, OK.
Thank you very much
for allowing me
to talk to everyone here today.
