João Moutinho, Bruno Coutinho and Lorenzo Buffoni of the Physics of Information and Quantum Technologies Group at Instituto de Telecomunicações won one of the Special Prizes in the Science4Cast Competition, a BigData Cup Challenge at the IEEE Big Data 2021. The conference was organized by the Institute of Advanced Research in Artificial Intelligence (IARAI), in Vienna, Austria.

Science4Cast 2021 had 72 submissions from all over the world competing to see who could provide the best predictions of future connections in a network of scientific concepts. Their pure network-theoretical approach provided a simple, intuitive, and scalable solution to the problem while remaining competitive with the best machine-learning approaches, which netted them the selection for one of the special prizes.

This achievement is closely related to the group's work on Quantum Link Prediction in Complex Networks, the main PhD project of João Moutinho, who is also enrolled in the Physics Doctoral Programme of Instituto Superior Técnico (IST), University of Lisbon, under the supervision of IT researcher Yasser Omar in collaboration with Bruno Coutinho.

In their recent article Quantum Link Prediction in Complex Networks, the authors propose a quantum algorithm that predicts new links in complex networks by sampling from a continuous-time quantum walk, allowing a potential quantum speedup in this problem.

News source:

http://www.phys-info.org/news/winners-at-the-science4cast-competition-2021

Further on this competition: