How INFORMS Can Contribute to the Second Quantum Revolution

The Second Quantum Revolution—comprising Quantum Computing, Quantum Communications, and Quantum Sensing—holds the promise of further abilities to improve the human condition, security, and sustainability, and hence, mass prosperity, across the world, in a variety of ways, including improving health (through better diagnosis as well as new drug development, via exciting applications of Quantum Machine Learning and Quantum Sensing) as well as by enhancing communication and cybersecurity. For certain computational workloads and sensing tasks, quantum systems have demonstrated or projected energy advantages over purely digital methods at equivalent precision, although system-level comparisons remain an active and unsettled research area. Seen through a data-science lens, quantum technologies are not only physical systems but also data-generating systems whose calibration, validation, and control depend on statistical inference, hypothesis testing, and learning under uncertainty. Integer programming, queuing, Markov decision processes, and semidefinite programs are some of the fundamental methodologies in operations research (OR) and management science (MS) that are used to tackle pract