Podcast with Anisha Musti

My guest today is Anisha Musti, a 16-year old high school student, founder and CEO of Q-munity, building the next generation of the quantum workforce. Anisha and I talk about the best age to start teaching quantum computing, what’s missing in building a quantum workforce, and much more.

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Yuval: Hello, Anisha. And thanks for joining me today.

Anisha: Yeah. Thank you for having me.

Yuval: So, who are you and what do you do?

Anisha: I'm Anisha. I am a 16-year-old quantum computing enthusiast. In my enthusiasm, I've done a few things. I am an intern at NYU in their quantum materials lab. I've also been an intern at UC Berkeley, but most prominently, I am the founder and CEO of an organization called Q-munity, which is an organization to build the next generation quantum workforce. And we focus on educating particularly younger people in the field of quantum computing.

Yuval: How early should one start learning quantum computing?

Anisha: As early as possible. Definitely earlier than how, generally, people are learning right now. People usually start in their undergraduate degree today. And that is a total no, no. That can't continue. We want to start with at least the high school level, and we believe it can go even earlier. But high school is the first barrier that we're trying to tackle right now.

Yuval: I remember looking at Tom Wong's book about quantum computing. I think it's called Classical and Quantum Computing. And he's asking for, I think, trigonometry as background. No need to know linear algebra. You don't need to know matrix calculations. So, do you think that's a decent level to start with, or you'd like to start even earlier?

Anisha: Yeah, I mean, I think you can start even earlier than that. I don't think that trigonometry is a very difficult place to start with because in the majority of high schools, you're learning that in freshman, sophomore year, your first couple years in the school. So, it's definitely a reasonable place to start from, which is why his book has gained some traction. But I do think that, when it comes to theoretical things and the computer science stuff, you can definitely get started on that even earlier than that.

Yuval: So let's assume I was a high school freshman.

Anisha: Yes. That's how I started quantum. I was a high school freshman when I started quantum.

Yuval: Very good. And since you can see me while we're recording this, you can see that I'm just a couple years removed from that. But let's assume I'm a high school freshman, and you either excited me about quantum computing or I read someplace that this is really cool. What are you going to, what's the first thing that you're going to teach me? Is it what a qubit is or how to put them together? How do I get started?

Anisha: Yeah, I mean, I honestly can speak to my own experience. When I was a freshman in high school, I basically just knew the simplest algebra concepts. And what I focused on was not really quantum competing by the math. So, a lot of the stuff were introduced to me almost as postulates, kind of, "This is how it works." Not really, "This is how you can use it." Or, "This is how you can implement it." Which I understand, to a lot of people, is kind of pointless. It's like, "Why are you teaching someone something if they're not able to actually understand how exactly it works and if they're not actually able to build on it?"

But when it comes to preparing them for the quantum workforce, explaining these theoretical concepts, like the double slit experiment, explaining all these different things that have happened, like what a qubit is, what spin is. Those things really sets them up so that, when they get that mathematical knowledge, and even if they're introduced to quantum later in university, it's not the first time they're hearing about it. So, it encourages them to actually pursue the career.

And that's kind of the way that we are looking at it. It's we understand that math is actually very crucial to implementing and building, but implementing and building, it's not the most key step in getting people to actually pursue quantum as a career.

Yuval: But for a high school student, again, beyond the potential, then they probably want to write some quantum program that does something that's cool.

Anisha: Yes.

Yuval: Now, I remember when I started with quantum computing, I was looking at the Q# tutorials and they said, "Oh, here's how you can make an eight sided cube, and basically take three qubits and then measure them," and so on. And that's a lot of work to just get a random number between zero and seven. So, what's the coolest thing that one could do without having to have all the math basis and so on?

Anisha: I mean, lots of things. I know I was in freshman year, I created an algorithm that took data about lungs with Parkinson's disease and analyzed their voice features using quantum machine learning to detect if they have it or not. And at this time I had no mathematical knowledge. And that is just the general nature of computer science. I know it is difficult, but it's difficult in a different way. And a lot of students today have grown up with computer science. People have taken classes as early as middle school to begin learning about computer science and how it works. So, when it comes to really difficult problems, even if it's in quantum computing, that still is an issue for them

Yuval: So, based on your experience in quantum computing, what do you think is missing, other than larger computers that have less noise and higher coherence? But what do you need as a quantum computing enthusiast to create better programs?

Anisha: I think the missing piece... So are you asking more about education and building the workforce? Or what we think we're missing technically?

Yuval: Well, I'm happy for you to answer both if you want.

Anisha: Okay, perfect. So, I'm not the best person to answer what's missing technically. I know a bit because of just reading, but obviously I'm at the very early stages of my career. So, I feel like other people may have better answers, but I obviously think it's a lot about the error correction rates of qubits right now, and being able to scale those up bigger. That's, again, not my area of expertise. I honestly can't explain more than that. That's just what I know, heard from reading and attending events.

But when it comes to education, what I think is really the missing piece is integration into schools at an early age. I think it's obviously amazing to even get people to engage in quantum, outside of school, as an extracurricular activity. But there is one common denominator amongst all high school students, and that's that they are in high school. So the only way that you can really ensure to reach most of these students is through the high school itself. And people have begun learning other types of subsets of computer science and sciences within school. There's now coding clubs, where they talk about machine learning. There's robotics clubs. There's different things where you can pursue subsets of various fields.

But that doesn't exist for quantum computing yet. That infrastructure isn't there. If you want to learn quantum computing, there are courses available. There are books, but those are always harder to reach students with because there's a financial barrier. There's a logistical barrier. There is so many other things coming up. Like a student in India can't always attend our courses due to time zones, financial constraints, all of the above. But if we bring it to their school, where all students are, then that barrier goes away and it's integrated into the education system. So, they have a greater incentive to participate and you're reaching students who might not have otherwise been interested.

A lot of times, students end up falling into something and not even realizing it's interesting to them. I know I, until I learned what quantum is on accident, I thought I was going to become a lawyer. That was what I genuinely thought. I was like, "I am not a STEM person. I am going to be a lawyer." And then I accidentally fell in love with quantum, because I accidentally stumbled upon it. But if I never accidentally stumbled upon it and somebody told me to go take a quantum computing summer camp, I would've never been interested. So, that's what we're looking towards in the future, is how can we bring this to where people already are?

Yuval: You mentioned that you run a company, Q-munity, right, if I remember?

Anisha: Yeah, Q-munity.

Yuval: How many people have you touched through that company?

Anisha: Yeah. So, we get this question a lot and honestly it's hard to measure exactly how many people you've touched because we've done so many different initiatives that the number is always hard to pinpoint. Like, how are we defining touch? Is it just people who've done our programs, taken our courses, et cetera? But we would estimate the number to be around 15,000 people, factoring in the size of our mailing list, which is typically past registrations from events, the size of our Discord community, our Twitter, Instagram, et cetera. That's around the number that we would estimate.

Yuval: What kind of events do you run?

Anisha: So, we've done workshops, we've done hackathons, a conference. We are newly launching our high school fellowship initiative, which is a program where we match high schoolers to researchers in the industry because building is a great way to learn, and you could only go so far with theory. And although it's great to get that little introduction to the theoretical concepts of quantum computing, and get a student excited, the next step from there is to build. And that's an amazing and really effective way to learn. So, we're trying to pair them up with mentors and do that. So, that's our current program.

Yuval: What do you want to be when you grow up? Do you get that a lot?

Anisha: Yes. I do get this a lot. And I mean, probably a quantum scientist. If I'm being honest, all things are pointing in that direction. But I am just at the very, very early stages of my career. I haven't even been to college yet, and I love physics. I love computer science and I will most likely end up doing a career that pursues the intersection of both of those. So, I really can't think of a better field than quantum computing. But yeah, that's where I'm at.

Yuval: Do you plan to go to college?

Anisha: Yes, definitely. I do definitely want to pursue STEM and computer science and physics at a greater scale. And I think, although higher education isn't necessary for a lot of careers, I think the career that I want to be in definitely does take those into account.

Yuval: And what's your dream college to get into?

Anisha: I'm actually just a junior in high school. So, I don't know yet. You should check in with me in six months, and maybe I'll have an answer, but not yet.

Yuval: Understood. Tell me about the quantum machine learning project, if you could. So, did you use a framework for machine learning for quantum, or is it something that was more bottoms up, almost at the individual qubit level?

Anisha: Yeah, we used... I don't know why I'm saying we. So used to talking like that. I did this a couple years ago. It was a quantum support vector machine. So, the support vector machine was an existing machine learning framework that already existed in the machine learning libraries. And pretty much, all I did was map that from machine learning onto a quantum circuit. And there's a lot of stuff that exists like that online. So, I pretty much just followed a lot of past examples and tried to use those concepts on a support vector machine. And once that happened, I built a part of the algorithm that actually extracts speech features from the voice input that people were giving and extracting these speech features like tone, jitter, things about their voice, and then using them in the support factor machine that's now mapped to the quantum circuit. We were able to detect Parkinson's disease.

Yuval: How well?

Anisha: I believe... Oh my gosh, it was so long ago. I believe it was 75, 80%. It wasn't really that accurate. But I think, for me, it was more of a proof like, "Wow, this can be a thing. This can actually work." And as quantum computers get more effective and efficient, which they probably are today, than, this was three years ago, that accuracy will naturally go up.

Yuval: And what did you run it on? Was it on a simulator? Was it on an annealing machine?

Anisha: So, I ran it on IBM's quantum computer.

Yuval: Understood. Very good. What are the key newsletters or conferences or websites that you follow to keep up to date with quantum?

Anisha: Twitter is a great tool for that. I am proud to say that I've made it onto quantum Twitter. My timeline is filled with hilarious tweets and news articles. So, honestly, scrolling through that gives me a pretty good sense of everything that's going on. I don't really follow anything else on top of that. I think that's pretty sufficient. It covers pretty much everything.

Yuval: Perfect. So, Anisha, how can people get in touch with you to learn more about your work?

Anisha: Yeah, so I have a personal web website, www.anishamusti.com . If you see my name on this podcast, it's pretty much that .com. And once you're on there, you can find my portfolio, a little bit about me, and you will also be able to find links to my other social media. So, my LinkedIn, my Twitter, et cetera. So, yeah, I would just recommend going to the website.

Yuval: Perfect. Well, thank you so much for joining me today.

Anisha: Yeah. Thank you again for having me.