IBM | qBraid Community Webinar Series
Where Quantum Optimization Actually Stands
Join us for the fourth and final session of the qBraid Community Webinar Series, a four-part series exploring the hardware and tools powering quantum computing, closing with IBM.
Optimization is the hardest place to claim a quantum advantage, and the most interesting. Almost every useful optimization algorithm, quantum or classical, is a heuristic with no performance guarantee, so nobody can prove an advantage on paper. It has to be demonstrated, against decades of very good classical operations research. IBM Research has been doing that work in the open: public benchmark libraries anyone can submit results to, published code, and honest reporting of where the classical baselines are still ahead.
Daniel Egger, Senior Research Scientist at IBM Research Zurich, walks through where quantum optimization stands today. Daniel has spent over a decade at IBM, starting on pulse-level control and calibration before moving up the stack into quantum algorithms for finance and combinatorial optimization, and he writes a good deal of the Qiskit machinery these methods run on. He'll cover how these algorithms actually work end to end: training the variational parameters, sampling on real quantum hardware, and the classical post-processing that turns raw samples into answers.
Then IBM's Ibrahim Shehzad takes it hands-on, live on qBraid. These are genuinely hybrid workflows, with heavy classical compute on one side and quantum hardware on the other, and qBraid is where both halves sit in the same notebook: GPUs on demand for the classical work, and your IBM Quantum account connected for the rest.
📅 Wednesday, October 7 · 11:00 AM CT / 12:00 PM ET · Online, with live Q&A
Set yourself up to follow along. Two free accounts and you're ready: a qBraid account for the notebook environment and GPUs at account.qbraid.com, and an IBM Quantum account for your API token at quantum.ibm.com. Add the token to qBraid and IBM's hardware is available from the same notebook. Both take a couple of minutes.
Attend live:
Everyone who attends live: 50% off qBraid subscriptions and credits
Registration is free.
Series: 01 NVIDIA → 02 NANOACADEMIC → 03 RIGETTI → 04 IBM