Ministry of Science and ICT and SKKU held the 2022 Qhackathon Korea

The 2022 Qhackathon Korea, hosted by the Ministry of Science and ICT (Minister Jong-Ho Lee) and organized by SKKU Quantum Information Center, was held from June 27 to 29 (2 nights and 3 days).

The Qhackathon contest was held at JW Marriott Hotel Seoul and Samjung Hotel to plant quantum information-related thinking in domestic students in 2022 Quantum Information Week and to strengthen competitiveness and expand the base through network formation. Unlike last year, which was held online due to COVID-19, this year’s competition was held offline and about 100 people from a total of 26 teams participated.

The contest was held with various domestic and foreign mentors consisting of domestic quantum information experts and quantum information researchers from IBM, and IonQ. With the help of mentors, the participants challenged a variety of topics ranging from building a quantum program to perform basic calculations to the latest research keywords such as quantum simulation, quantum computer error mitigation, and quantum machine learning over a given period of time, and presented and shared the results to participants and evaluators on the final day of the competition.

In this competition, a total of 7 awards were awarded, including the Minister of Science and ICT Award and the SKKU President’s Award. The ‘Qbrain’ team that announced ‘Meeting Neuromorphic Computing and Quantum’ was selected for the Minister of Science and ICT Award. The SKKU President’s Award went to the ‘Peach Ice Tea’ team for publishing ‘Quantum Convolutional Neural Network for Random Input Dimensions’.

Kiseok Kwon, manager of the Ministry of Science and ICT and Professor Yonuk Chong of SKKU said in the congratulatory speech, “It is encouraging that the participants’ progress and participation in the 2022 Qhackathon Korea stand out and their skills have improved remarkably compared to the previous competition. Based on the successful hosting of this competition, the next competition will be to plan programs for the general public and expand the size of the award.”