Dr. Peter Shor (Yes, that Peter Shor) has joined Zapata Quantum’s Scientific Advisory Board (SAB), along with three other highly-regarded quantum scientists.
“The new SAB members will advise on Zapata’s scientific and technical direction, including the further development of Quantum Pilot, its hardware-agnostic platform combining decision intelligence and engineering to discover and develop quantum applications,” a press release stated.
Other new members of the SAB include Dr. Alexandru Paler, Associate Professor of Computer Science at Aalto University in Finland; Dr. Simon Devitt, Professor and Director of the Centre for Quantum Software and Information (QSI) at the University of Technology, Sydney; and Dr. Artur Izmaylov, Professor of Theoretical and Computational Chemistry at the University of Toronto.
All important players on the academic front, but there is no disputing that the biggest name here is Shor’s, as he provided theoretical proof of quantum advantage and developed Shor’s Algorithm while at Bell Labs in the 1990s. That also brought into the open the notion of quantum computing as a threat to standard encryption techniques. That, in turn, inspired the hunt for post-quantum cryptography and other quantum-safe security methods, all the talk of Q-Day, and the founding of numerous companies now aiming to arm governments and corporate enterprises with PQC.
All the while, since 2003, Shor has been at MIT. He has advised quantum companies–QuSecure, for example–though has never established his own quantum start-up.
Advisory boards, and SABs in particular, are interesting beasts. Any company with such a board will tell you that the strategic and technical guidance they provide are invaluable. But, over the years, and especially when I was covering telecom on a day-to-day basis, I would hear about start-ups with advisory boards that were more or less for show, milking the names of board members to enhance the company’s brand profile and lend a young firm some gravitas.
That said, it does not seem like Peter Shor has exactly jumped at every opportunity to make bank on his good name, so maybe he has been picky about who he chooses to advise. Zapata’s SAB for now sounds like a promising development for a company that has been gradually working its way back from a post-SPAC merger collapse. Quantum Pilot just launched last month as a platform to help corporate enterprises identify areas of need and develop quantum applications to address them. Let’s see what Shor and the rest of the SAB bring to the table.
Image via freepik
Quantum News Nexus is a site from freelance writer and editor Dan O’Shea that covers quantum computing, quantum sensing, quantum networking, quantum-safe security, and more. You can find him on X @QuantumNewsGuy and doshea14@gmail.com.
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