The QOSF mentorship program (3-4 months) pairs quantum computing enthusiasts with industry and academia mentors to build interesting projects together. Out of over 800 applicants (most of whom undergrads and graduate students), I had zero expectation that QOSF would admit me—a high schooler—as one of the 40 mentees accepted into the program. Nonetheless, I was excited to hear the news, and I couldn't be more thankful for this opportunity :)

Looking back at my QC journey since last September, I've been exploring the space through building a wide range of QC projects. Although I've learned a lot through that approach, I'll use this mentorship opportunity as a vehicle to dive deeply into one specific topic within quantum machine learning in the coming months. 

Under guidance from my mentor, Yunong 😀 (a research scientist at AWS Braket), we'll be exploring the application of quantum generative adversarial networks (QGANs) in portfolio optimization. That's a lot of words, I know. The gist is to build a project together that explores the applications of QML in finance—inspired by the QHack project I worked on last month. 

I look forward to keeping y'all updated as it progresses!

Context: As part of TKS, my team and I prepared a recommendation deck for UN Women to close the digital gender divide (slide deck).

What happened: In South Africa and Ghana, the vast majority have access to mobile devices but not the internet. We can't imagine our lives without access to the wealth of info on the web, so my team (Om, Shawki, Michael) and I built an SMS-based text search engine (Unity Search) that allows anyone in South Africa and Ghana to text our number (+1-647-371-0591) to ask any question as if it was a google search (you can try it right now🙂).

How does it work? We used a state-of-the-art AI language model developed by OpenAI (GPT-3) to index and summarize the results.

What do the locals think? We piloted our prototype in Eastern Cape (South Africa) and Kumasi (Ghana) with around 30 locals. They loved it! We had over 300 messages received in 2 days. The word cloud I've placed above actually shows some of the messages we've received :)

What's next? In a few weeks, we'll register local phone numbers and WhatsApp integration to make it accessible to everyone in both Ghana and South Africa.