Qubits Japan 25

Dr. Alan Baratz became the CEO of D-Wave in 2020. Previously, as Executive Vice President of R&D and Chief Product Officer, he drove the development, delivery, and support of all of D-Wave’s products, technologies, and applications. He has over 25 years of experience in product development and bringing new products to market at leading technology companies and software startups. As the first president of JavaSoft at Sun Microsystems, Alan oversaw the growth and adoption of the Java platform from its infancy to a robust platform supporting mission-critical applications in nearly 80 percent of Fortune 1000 companies. He has also held executive positions at Symphony, Avaya, Cisco, and IBM. He served as CEO and president of Versata, Zaplet, and NeoPath Networks, and as a managing director at Warburg Pincus LLC. Alan holds a doctorate in computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Prof. Hidetoshi Nishimori was the first to propose the quantum annealing computation model that operates under the natural laws of physics to enable high-speed resolution of hard and complex problems, such as combinatorial optimization. The basic theory of quantum annealing was developed in the field of statistical mechanics. The professor spent many years conducting research on the phenomena of random spin systems, which is a typical spatially non-uniform system that is regarded as a central problem in statistical mechanics. Through this research, he showed that there is a special area in a phase diagram, called the "Nishimori line", where an exact solution can be obtained. This discovery has been of monumental importance to statistical mechanics, and the professor’s remarkable contribution has been paramount to outcomes such as error correction code in information theory which leverages the properties of random spin systems and the Nishimori line. His findings also gave rise to a quantum annealing model that he jointly proposed with his student, Tadashi Kadowaki, in 1998. Through his research on mathematical models of magnetic bodies, in which he studied random interactions of particles with surrounding particles that had only two allowed orientations (up or down), he discovered that optimization problems consisting of systems that search for the lowest energy configuration is a standard format of combinatorial optimization.  

Dr. Trevor Lanting is a senior R&D executive with over 15 years of experience in technology development. He leads D-Wave’s product development organization, which includes teams responsible for software, systems, and cloud services. Trevor, who joined D-Wave in 2008, has previously served as Senior Vice President of Software, Algorithms, and Cloud Services and Vice President of Science. He has helped drive the development and deployment of five generations of annealing quantum computing systems and specializes in connecting fundamental research results and insights with real-world applications, focusing on harnessing quantum mechanics to produce fundamentally new computational capabilities. He holds a BSc in physics and astronomy from the University of British Columbia and a PhD in physics from the University of California, Berkeley. His graduate work involved pioneering the development of superconducting technology for emerging astrophysics platforms.

Masaru earned a Ph.D. from the Graduate School of Science at the University of Tokyo. He has held various positions, including Scientific Researcher at RIKEN, Associate Professor at Tokyo Institute of Technology (TIT), Professor at the University of Hyogo, and currently, he is the Chief Scientific Officer (CSO) at the Central Pharmaceutical Research Center, Japan Tobacco (JT). His previous research focused on Quantum Dynamical Analyses in large Biological Macromolecular Systems and Genome Information-based Systems Biology of higher Eukaryote organisms. These studies were integrated into mathematical spaces embedded in AI systems.Building on these scientific achievements, he is now engaged in AI-driven computational Drug Discovery (DD), developing theoretical analysis systems. Quantum Physics-driven Dynamical computer simulation techniques are critical to creating truly intellectual AI systems. Consequently, Quantum Computation and its adaptations to Drug Discovery are of significant interest to him.

Takumi Hattori is engaged in data analysis related to network quality at NTT Docomo for three years. Worked on developing network parameter optimization technologies using quantum annealing, communication quality estimation technologies using machine learning, and effect measurement technologies using causal inference.

Masayuki Ohzeki received a Ph.D. degree in science from the Department of Physics, Tokyo Institute of Technology in September 2008. In May 2010, he joined the Department of Systems Science, Graduate School of Informatics, Kyoto University as an Assistant Professor. From April 2011, he worked as a project researcher at the Department of Physics, La Sapienza Rome, Italy. In 2016, he was appointed as an Associate Professor at Graduate School of Information Sciences, Tohoku University. He founded Sigma-i Co., Ltd. and has since been serving as its CEO in 2019. In 2021, he became a Professor at the Department of Fundamental Informatics, Graduate School of Information Sciences, Tohoku University. In May 2022, he was appointed as a Distinguished Researcher at Tohoku University. Since 2024, he has also been serving as a Professor at the Department of Physics, School of Science, Institute of Science Tokyo, through a cross-appointment system.