WE NOTE THAT THE FOLLOWING TRANSCRIPT WAS CREATED BY A ROBOT SO PLEASE FORGIVE ANY TYPOS.
[Brian] So welcome everyone who is watching this, this is an interview with rena dial that we’re conducting for dead cat live cat. Dead cat live cat is an online quantum computing magazine founded by the by a bunch of really nerdy lawyers like me. That say we’re attorneys but we’re also scientists engineers and futurist focused on the likelihood that quantum computing coupled with Ai are going to fundamentally change our world within two decades. So you know a bit about me i’m Brian Beckham associate with zuber waller i’ve been practicing intellectual property law for about 14 years and handling a variety of technologies. Including pharmaceutical novel drug delivery systems virtual reality videography motion capture software and electronics. I actually started out as a physics major in college got through quantum mechanics and decided based on that to switch to mechanical engineering but we’re back in quantum mechanics now and trying to. Trying to develop our legal practice within the quantum computing world our firm Zuber Lawler is one of the most selective law firms, the United States represent clients throughout the world. From offices in Austin Chicago Denver Los Angeles phoenix New York and Silicon Valley. In addition to representing the list of fortune companies, as well as funds and government entities. Zuber Lawler represents leading companies and emerging industries and technologies, including blockchain clean tech esports for reality and legalized cannabis. Zuber Lawler our focuses on m&a finance and other deals ipos intellectual property and the trust data and privacy FDA anti-corruption and other regulatory work and litigation. Zuber Lawler attorneys working in languages covering 90% of the world’s population our website www.zuberlawler.com, but enough about me we’re here to talk to Reena. Reena, can you tell us a little bit about your yourself and your background.
[Reena] yeah sure so i’m an engineer, and I been in the tech industry for 29 years and doing different things, but mostly as a technologist and somebody who’s been focusing on innovation and innovation management, as well as emerging in future tech. So, for example in my in large corporates I have been responsible for setting up innovation functions and at the same time creating new practices for business. Which are technology focused, mostly in the emerging tech area so used to be in you know, a couple of decades earlier, I used to be more deeply involved on the storage networking side. operating system Linux and so on, and then eventually focused on a wide variety of technologies for the high tech sector. And last year, I decided to leave the corporate sector and start off for two entities, the quarter, called the boredom ecosystems and technology Council of India, which is a not for profit and the other is my own consulting business as of insight and advisors.
[Brian] And you first become interested in quantum computing.
[Reena] So you know I I used to like physics as a subject and at some point we started reading a lot about both string theory, as well as. analytics primarily because of the curiosity of trying to understand how how reality works and even similar to any any physicist, although I was not one. And then in 2017 when I was working with Microsoft, Microsoft announced that they’re working on a to sharp. Programming language for quantum and that gives me an opportunity to go deeper into the subject to quantum computing and I got more deeply involved, and since 2017 have been extremely involved in the point of ecosystem. yeah so that’s that’s how it happened.
[Brian] I know you said you founded your company, but insight and advisors what does he do.
[Reena] So here, you know, the focus is on consulting cx sauce and boats around the impact that in colleges and futuristic technologies can create. Some of these they can actually create opportunities for disruption, which means that there is a huge business opportunity there, but there is also a threat and adjust that needs to be managed and you know uprising, the. The Board, as well as senior decision makers, about the nature of that impact helping them strategize based on that. is one of the focus areas, the other area is to look at the impact that technology, maybe this businesses but on society as well, so issues like ethics and technology also ethics in quantum metrics in Ai all ethics related questions, as well as questions that may lead to. policy solutions so i’m more involved in that space as well.
[Brian] have to come up with the idea to create them site.
[Reena] One of the things that I had been following from a technical perspective and which you know I love as a technologist but really fascinated me especially in 2014 I did of course I wasn’t a fellowship to Oxford University, which was focused on. Innovation policy and technology and somehow the policy angle started making a lot of sense to me because suddenly there was this whole opportunity to look at technology and the benefits that it brings to society. And i’m a technologist I love technology, I believe there’s so much that can be done, but then, sometimes it gets a negative name. How technology gets misused and the right way to solve this problem is to essentially look at the right kind of guidelines of. policy decisions so that we continue to harness technology for the positive, so I guess in 2014 I started interested in this space, so when I when you know I decided to start consulting I realized that there is an opportunity to go deeper into this space and. People you know, business people they seem to be not really tuned into some of the more complex and emerging technologies, for example, quantum itself is. A very difficult subject and a lot of people, maybe very smart business people, but they you know sort of. fumbling around this technology in terms of trying to understand what does it really mean, how does it, how is it going to impact my industry, for example, and whether I should be making that investment decision at this point in time. issue now 10 years from now, right, so all those questions are plenty around and I, I felt this was the right time to try and get people to solve. Problems answer those questions and take the right decisions.
[Brian] Then you also mentioned the quantum ecosystems technology Council of India, which are the founding chairperson what is that the organization’s goals.
[Reena] So that’s a not for profit entity which is a membership based organization in the queue etc I works very closely with the government, industry, academia. start all the members of the quantum ecosystem, to see how we can accelerate the ecosystem and and when I talk about capitalizing and acceleration it’s more about you all the players together understanding, where the gaps are. As a team time making recommendations on how the gaps can be filled and then leading industry help formulate additional institute’s if they are required. To you know sort of address those gaps, you know do a little bit of guidance on that and then move on to the next part of the ecosystem see how we can you know some other problems so it’s it’s essentially a think tank. and enabling a dmv also you know make policy recommendations that space.
[Brian] So as a as a technologist and futurist, what do you see as the biggest potential applications for quantum computing technology today?
[Reena] So there’s just so many possibilities that that are there with quantum, but I think the biggest opportunity that is there, and which is going to have the most visible positive impact. Is in solving the problems associated with sustainability, how do you create a sustainable planet. You know by harnessing and understanding some processes in nature and mimicking them and then you know, contributing to this whole climate change agenda and i’ll give you an example, you know if you look at the fertilizer production in nature, you know nitrogen fixing bacteria actually. There is a compound called nitrogen as which accepts a catalyst in the soil to actually produce nitrogen. And this is a process which is works with hundred percent efficiency and the energy usage is very less that’s how nature operates, but when we try to create the same fertilizer. and be you know sort of do it at massive temperatures, a couple of hundred degrees of atmospheric pressures and you have a 60% efficient process at the Max way. So quantum it gives us the potential to take some of these molecules analyze them understand how the reactions really had been in nature and try and simulate those so that we could also have more. success and we don’t you know, in the process of creating something positive, we don’t create those byproducts you know which are negative right, so I think that’s the opportunity that’s the biggest opportunity.
[Brian] is getting into some of the details, how would quantum computing allow us to perform that analysis in a way that classical computing doesn’t.
[Reena] yeah so you know if you look at the basic concept of other basic demise of our computation happens in classical we talked about a bit and that’s the bit has a value of zero or one. In quantum computing you talking about a cubit which can have a word. or a state which is called a superposition state of all possible. Now, when you look at this specific behavior which is called superposition and another behavior call entanglement, which is the you know the two features of quantum physics, that we sort of take advantage of and reading quantum computing. The opportunity here is that if you look at n number of bits of those n number of bits can have a value which ranges between zero to two to the power in now, if you. hit. n cubits can have all possible values from zero to two to the power in so suddenly be exponentially increased the number of values that are being manipulated at the same time, through a number of keywords as as opposed to end number of bits and just said this in context. If we’re talking about 100 qubit quantum computer. or 1000 qubit quantum computer we forgot about it about. thousand which is around 10 to the box 301. And that’s the number, which is way larger than the number of. stars in the known universe right, so we are suddenly talking about a very, very, very massive computational capacity and also an opportunity to do. Calculations in a in a specific scenarios are innovating fast forward baby because of this. feature called superposition when you want to do a search kind of you know, if you want to do a search what ends up happening is that you can do it in a much smaller time frame, because of a certain amount of. badly in word in this calculation when you do it on a quantum computer and that sort of speeds things up exponentially when I say battle ISM i’m actually being very unscientific when I say that, but that’s the best way to describe it when we want to describe it in a very simple manner.
[Brian] Now, what do you see as the opportunities for quantum computing technology, specifically for India.
[Reena] Reena Dayal: So. I think the possibilities are great, I think, from a quantum computing technology perspective, this, so much so many hardware. approaches that are being taken around the world, but it’s for donning based. spin semiconductor technology are we talking about diamonds within V centers some of these technologies are required working at cryogenic temperatures and then in other cases, there is room temperature solutions that are coming up and then photonics. So, and on top of that, there are multiple players that are now they’re in the industry who are working on. You know proprietary solutions software solutions software stacks or these hardware, but also players were trying to incorporate multiple hardware under the same software platform and. So they have companies who are present at every layer. There are other companies were focusing on very specific solutions for a particular industry. And, and so the whole ecosystem has matured a lot in the last three to four years and this rapid progress that is happening over to this is an exciting time. For quantum that India is in the same position, I think there’s a lot that is happening, the number of startups you know is gradually rising in this space. And the end user community is getting interested it just last week, I made a presentation to the senior leadership asked by them, you know they wanted to hear out as to what quantum is and how it can impact them for very large infrastructure right we’re into airports. construction projects, energy and so on day two, I think the end user industry is also getting very interested about it worldwide it’s happening in India, so I think the possibilities are really, really, in terms of. Connected playground for pointing right now in with.
[Brian] So in talking with all these with these companies that are moving into the into the quantum computing industry which of them are which types of companies do you see as being the first strong market entrance and quantum computing both worldwide and certainly in India.
[Reena] So there are these traditional tech companies right, and these are going to be pretty standard hardware, software. sensor based companies quantum answered focused companies, you know, using those solutions quantum communication companies quantum security forms right, so all of these are. By citrix the other ones who are creating the base or the technology that others can use, but if you want to look at the end user industry, the chemical industry, the materials industry, the pharmaceutical industry, especially in the drug discovery process. Specific sensor technology, whether it is for detection detecting gravity based sensors which detect what’s happening. You know underground without really penetrating the down or what have you know getting high fidelity sensors for most very different kind of either for tracking whether or tracking objects and so on. These are you know technologies which are near very near commercialization much faster and there’s also a lot of medical imaging side right, so we see that area. would emerge as, of course, eventually quantum computing is going to impact every industry, these are some of the early entrance and I cannot forget the banks, the banks are also looking at how to leverage quantum specific specifically for fraud detection for. What high speed shading and so on.
[Brian] um now What opportunities do you see for international collaboration in the quantum computing space, especially between India and the rest of the world.
[Reena] I think the opportunity creation is immense and I tell you every. Every place has its own uniqueness every location has its own uniqueness, if you look at India traditionally India has been a services sector, you know very strong in the services sector, the largest. largest system integrators you know are based out of India now, why is that important at the end of the day, if you look at areas like quantum security. We talk about the phenomenon that if you have a scalable quantum computer and the existing cryptographic algorithms that are considered foolproof like REC 2048. Or the aes encryption algorithms they are likely to get broken, so the entire industry is now gearing towards something called post. And we have to you know worldwide plan for the transition to happen that is going to be a massive transformation by the product companies are focusing on seeing how. Their products are going to incorporate these new algorithms and new mechanisms for being secure in the post quantum data or whatever these large digital footprints that each of the end user industries, has the largest plug in play of products, there is a lot of customized solutions that exist. So there’s a these are going to be massive transformations and the industry, which is you know best suited to do this is the services industries, the system integrators so that’s the opportunity for India, if you look at just for them security. Worldwide, I think, so you know definitely you know product companies need to collaborate with the services industry on. This already very strong need to do that just from an industry perspective if I look at the government perspective because governments are really interested, you know investing a lot in this space. With very specialized programs, I think the need to collaborate comes from the fact that this technology has a huge amount of. Now any technology which has strong potential also has certain high risks associated with it and, contrary to popular opinion that if it is a high risk or you know very sensitive space. You know people need to hold on to it actually makes better sense to collaborate because it’s very difficult for a nations worldwide to reach a consensus on it, in the sense that you may not even know what certain players in one and these could be nation states, these could be just. You know or you’re just players and these players could be good or bad, so the only way to address this is through collaboration and i’m not saying this as. As something very, very unique, because if you look at cyber security, the word Initially it was all about hey I have the best algorithms, let me just. And then eventually it ended up being a whole lot of collaboration in order to. beat the hackers. You know that’s what ended up happening, I think, in quantum, we need to take that approach, right from the beginning.
[Brian] How, how would you expect to persuade countries to collaborate rather than hoard or block technology, especially quantum computing. With the national security implications, you mentioned cyber security issues on first one, of the one of the you know strong. Application possibilities for quantum computing as an integer factorization and that would go to the very heart of. A lot of our cure, a lot of our current encryption schemes. So how do we address the, how do we promote international collaboration, while still assuring governments that it’s not a threat to national security or corporate security.
[Reena] In my mind I think there’s a need to educate the government’s on the exact ramifications of how this whole technology is going to play because based on the cybersecurity example it’s very clear that there has to be collaboration. From the beginning there’s also a need for physician policy guidelines and policies and regulations down the line right so starting having this conversation early on, with the government is with the government is, I think, a good step. In general, creating more of a policy in a language which is more simplified and is not filled with the Academy jargon that it is mostly associated with these, this is another way to sort of get the dialogue going. So why did not make for them for the exam simply. You know released a set of the one in prison for quantum you know which are which are positively motivated and they. Were as a guideline for everybody to start looking at, you know how should this technology you deploy and one of the principles that is being talked about is collaboration. Because it is really important for the proper growth and usually technology, incidentally, I was one of the authors for that. And the Guidelines were denied by. getting away from across the globe so it’s pretty representative in that sense yeah.
[Brian] What are some other challenges, you see that could inhabit international collaboration, other than the national security issue that we just discussed.
[Reena] Absolutely, I think you know, there is because of the power of and potential of this technology, there are also use cases which are Defense deleted. So definitely you know Defense related use cases, specifically with you just take one simple example like quantum sensor witches. which it has a higher accuracy and it. Actually, is a threat from a Defense perspective because, so this is conversation around, how do you create quantum camouflage, for example, right So these are very, very different specific use cases of. If you can have technology at your fingertips, which is exponential in nature and way different from classical computing and once you have a scalable quantum computer. What all can you simulate can you create artificial general intelligence much more easily, you know and in a short time frame, so I think that is the other challenge right, I think, which. You know, depending on how much importance is given to that, and as long as that importance, because if there is a if there is a fear of this importance becoming lopsided see you know this is so critical let’s not even talk about other things that. You know what it can do for Defense and national security, then there’s a whole agenda for this technology can get very skewed in could result in silos across the work, but if you look at how the world operates today that’s an extremely dangerous situation because silos. Silos of that kind of going to change the world order they want to change the balance that exists today, depending on how technology. Different parts of the world, so just to maintain the balance, as we see today, we have to have collaboration, so that there is, you know, there is this given take, and you know the right kind of information flowing across the world is can be managed yeah.
[Brian] What challenges do you anticipate for quantum computing companies and addressing intellectual property issues?
[Reena] So until a few years ago, the entire quantum domain. Especially on the computing side, whatever was happening was the research space, so you largely had academicians and people who had moved from a guide me into the industry who are working in this space. which also meant that for anybody who has to understand what this was all about was you know almost impossible, you have to really you know sort of. Train yourself in that space to actually move forward now, today, the situation is changing a bit. There are people sitting physics have some sort of physics background and has strong Business and Technology leanings, they are you know sort of morphing into these people who you know can. How did you get more deeply involved and there is product ization happening Lord most startup activity happening now have the lawyers all geared up to understand what can. I do very, very basic level so that they can address the IP requirements in this space, I think y’all this group Dead Cat Live Cat that is the only unique group is a bunch of lawyers who got together and they you know sort of have this. New role and an understanding of both sides, otherwise the whole issue is just about awareness and understanding, and you know. Whether we want to miss an opportunity for creating an IP that’s one, the other is in areas where trading an IP is not going to really help the ecosystem, what is the kind of advice that. From the ecosystem from the lawyers and how those conversations flowing. Which are legal in nature, as well as. with the commercial interests of a company versus how much they want to really put out there.
[Brian] So is there anything else you’d like to tell our audience about any of your businesses or quantum computing or anything else. You want to say.
[Reena] yeah. Since I have an opportunity to do so that sometimes it is very difficult for business people to really understand how cross sectoral impact gets created from emerging technology so, for example, when you look at space technology if you are materials or an infrastructure company, you will think okay great it’s a fascinating area, why should I be bothered about the reality is that. Because of some of these the focus on let’s say habitats on Mars or moon, there is a research happening with new ideas which are able to withstand certain amount of radiation and so on, and once those materials are getting deployed there are there is this. You know Aha moments of knowledge for people to see my copy use this for some instruction on this planet itself. So something like that happens it actually may disrupt the construction industry, plus it has already creating some opportunity for the materials industry as well, so understanding, some of these. specialization for somebody who’s constantly watching this field actually didn’t give you these insights in a go. But if you’re just in the business space of your industry, you may actually compete you miss out on these things so today every company has to think that they are technology company and they can get disrupted by it and. If you have any insights bins item advisors can help.
[Brian] All right, thank you Reena, thank you for your time. it’s been a great interview and we’ll look forward to seeing what Benzitan. Does in the future.
[Reena] Thank you.
