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The HSD Trendmonitor is designed to provide access to relevant content on various subjects in the safety and security domain, to identify relevant developments and to connect knowledge and organisations. The safety and security domain encompasses a vast number of subjects. Four relevant taxonomies (type of threat or opportunity, victim, source of threat and domain of application) have been constructed in order to visualize all of these subjects. The taxonomies and related category descriptions have been carefully composed according to other taxonomies, European and international standards and our own expertise.
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Quantum computing has evolved from a theoretical concept to a practical phenomenon
dynamic portfolio analysis and optimisation, clustering and arbitrage.That said, QC still has a lot of maturing to do before it’s a viable computing option for enterprises that can deliver meaningful, cost-effective business results.
Evolution of Quantum Computing
Physicists and mathematicians were already theorising how a quantum computer could work in practice three decades ago. In fact, the possibility of QC was proposed in the early ‘80s, by physicist Richard Feynman. However, scientists and engineers have had much difficulty actually building such a computer. For this reason, quantum computers remained a theoretical concept for many years. The situation has changed over the last five years, though, and we’ve seen the relevant hardware and software necessary for QC move out of university labs and into business contexts – that is, the technology has evolved from a theoretical concept to a practical phenomenon. That said, QC still has a lot of maturing to do before it’s a viable computing option for enterprises that can deliver meaningful, cost-effective business results.
The key challenges facing Quantum Computing
There are reasons why QC hasn’t quite taken flight yet, even though there’s been ongoing research in this field for the past 30 years. Some of these include:
• It’s incredibly difficult to get access to a quantum computer. There are currently only a few in existence and they’re based at the offices of some of the world’s biggest companies ( e.g. NASA, Google, ExxonMobil, IBM and CERN). Quantum computers are extremely expensive and very complex to build from a technical standpoint;
• QC requires extremely low temperatures to function optimally. The cores of D-Wave quantum computers operate at -273 degrees Celsius. For this reason, QC consumes an inordinate amount of energy;
• The number of stable qubits is still low – max 50 - 100 unstable qubits or 10 stable qubits – and the error rate is still too high. As a result, our ability to apply QC in the real world is still very limited;
• QC is radically different from traditional computation and requests a very different way of programming – of which we only have seen the beginnings
What tomorrow holds for Quantum Computing
Threats, risks and challenges aside, QC gives us plenty of reason to feel positive about the future. This is because QC has the potential to help businesses across industries to overcome major stumbling blocks and run computationally challenging, or even previously impossible, operations. Companies are increasingly aware of this: Research shows that 40 percent of businesses are taking proactive steps towards QC, with 36 percent planning to take steps to invest in QC within the next two to five years. Although a world that has resolved all climate change dilemmas is still a lifetime away, we’re already getting glimpses of the solutions QC can offer in this regard. QC is certainly no longer just hype or a phenomenon you only see in sci-fi movies. These days, more and more parties are seriously looking at viable and valuable ways to use the technology