Study Abroad Experiences 2020
During the Spring semester of 2020 I spent my time on the TUJ campus of Japan. I have been wanting to go to Japan for since I was in elementary school, and studying abroad at Temple Japan was the perfect opportunity to fulfill this goal of mine.
Whilst abroad, I was able to fulfill three of my general business education courses; Marketing Management, Risk Management, and Managerial Accounting. I was also given the opportunity to take a practical Japanese class which helped a great deal when navigating around Tokyo.
Risk Management was a particularly interesting class focusing specifically on insurance in Japan and how it differs from Insurance in other parts of the world. I became good friends with the teacher of the class Professor Gibbons and he invited my friend Dominic and I to a seminar on Quantum Advantage in Finance hosted by the CFA Society of Japan. We accepted his invitation knowing how this event would benefit our MIS degrees.
The presentation was presented by Mattia Fiorentini, the head of Machine Learning and Quantum Computing at Cambridge Quantum Computing in the UK. He explained how Quantum Computers are very good at specific computing tasks but poor at general computing tasks. Since Quantum Computers use Qbits, it’s machine code can be in a state of superposition making it fundamentally different from how normal computers operate. This difference makes Quantum Computing valuable for process heavy operations but inefficient for user end/day to day operations. To overcome this challenge, Mr Fiorentini and his team are developing a hybrid algorithm to make it easier to transfer information from traditional computer hardware to Quantum computers, and vice versa. These Hybrid Algorithms are a great way to make quantum computing practical for business use and have been used by JPMorgan for option pricing and by the Commonwealth Bank of Australia for portfolio re-balancing. In the MIS field, I can see a similar setup for large scale sentiment analysis on social media or for performing ETL on massive amounts of data in a company. The Event was very eye opening to the practical business applications of Quantum Computing and I would like to thank Professor Gibbons for giving me the opportunity to attend this event.
CFA Society of Japan Event Page:
https://www.cfasociety.org/Japan/Lists/Events%20Calendar/DispForm.aspx?ID=960