The Quantum Open Source Foundation (QOSF) and Unitary Fund named Victory Omole as the 2021 Winner of the Wittek Quantum Prize for Open Source Software for his outstanding contributions to Google’s Cirq library and other open source projects.
The organizers write: “Victory deserves this prize due to his continuous and enthusiastic support of open quantum software mainly, but not only, through his outstanding involvement with Cirq. The jury recognized his outstanding efforts when it came to improving the Cirq library, building the community and actively participating in the weekly developer meetings. His open source work truly demonstrates his strong dedication to the quantum ecosystem.”
Cirq is Google’s software library for near-term quantum computers which is widely used by quantum computing researchers in industry & academia and which was famously used to program the Sycamore processor for Google’s demonstration of quantum advantage in 2019.
Omole is also active in supporting the open source efforts in quantum.
The organizers write, “Next to his continuous efforts with Cirq, Victory is also working on open source software as part of his job at Super.tech where he develops SuperstaQ — an API for optimizing quantum programs for various hardware backends to make them capable of execution on existing noisy intermediate scale (NISQ) hardware. Beyond his open source work on Github, Victory is sharing his insights about quantum software and quantum computing by being an active member of the popular Quantum Computing StackExchange.”
Omole is ranked in the top 16% of all users in Quantum Computing StackExchange and has reached over 42,000 people with his questions and answers.
The three runners-up, in no particular order, are Kesha Hietala who led the design of the SQIR quantum programming language, Paul Nation who co-created QuTiP and Robert Smith who started the Quil ecosystem and open-sourced large parts of the Rigetti software stack.
The jury reviewed over 35 candidatures from the worldwide community.
Victory will give a more detailed talk about Cirq, Super.tech and his other open source contributions as part of the Unitary Fund’s Twitch channel on Feb 10th at 9AM PST/12PM EST.
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