NEWS MODELLING AND SIMULATION
Cambridge Quantum releases an open- source quantum natural language processing toolkit and library
Cambridge Quantum has released a toolkit and library for Quantum Natural Language Processing (QNLP). The toolkit is called lambeq, named after the late mathematician and linguist Joachim Lambek. lambeq is an open-source
structure for laboratories in Northern Ireland, to split ‘hot’ from ‘cold’ work, and to invest in a single LIMS and digital pathology. CliniSys won the single LIMS contract
following an open tender process run by the Business Services Organisation (BSO) on behalf of Health and Social Care Northern Ireland. CliniSys’ 30 years’ experience and proven ability to develop and deploy fully networked multi-sited LIMS solutions was a deciding factor. Karen Bailey, interim chief executive of
the BSO, said: ‘A new LIMS is critical to the modernisation and transformation of pathology in Northern Ireland. The tender emphasised that we were
“I believe that a world- class digital healthcare service is at the heart of our future needs”
looking for a system that could support standardised models of working and embed best practice, while reducing training requirements and delivering a great user experience. It also underlined that we wanted a system that could deliver a sustainable flow of real-time information to dashboards, so it could be accessed by everybody who might need it. ‘The choice of WinPath Enterprise means Northern Ireland’s laboratories will benefit from a single LIMS that has been designed with the needs of modern, pathology networks constantly in mind. We look forward to seeing it rolled out and to the deployment of GLIMS Genomics.’ The single LIMS will support the
laboratories at Northern Ireland’s five acute trusts and the Northern Ireland Blood Transfusion Service. Collectively, they employ 1,100 people, who carry
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out more than 40 million tests a year, to support health and care services for 1.8 million people, living across an area of 14,000 square kilometres. CliniSys will work with digital and pathology experts to develop an effective design and implementation model to deliver at this scale. A single design authority will be set up to configure the system, with representatives from all five trusts and all pathology disciplines. CliniSys’ deployment team will support
the first go-live, which is planned for Belfast Trust in around 18 months. The company will then transfer skills to local digital teams so they can support subsequent go-lives. CliniSys will also make sure that WinPath
Enterprise and GLIMS Genomics can provide data feeds to more than 70 other systems and that they are fully integrated with the core systems that clinicians use. This will include integration with the Epic electronic patient record that Northern Ireland chose in 2020. CliniSys chief executive Richard Craven
said: ‘This is a big and exciting project. It is a national deployment for WinPath Enterprise and the first UK deployment of GLIMS Genomics. ‘We are honoured that CliniSys has been
trusted to deliver technology that is vital to the smooth-running of Northern Ireland’s laboratories and its public health and healthcare systems. We are also honoured that we are being trusted to play such a big part in the modernisation, transformation and innovation agenda. ‘This is a 10-year contract, so we are in
this for the long term,’ Craven continued. ‘We are looking forward to working with Health and Social Care Northern Ireland, PathNetNI, individual laboratories and pathologists on the implementation and to helping them shape the future of diagnostic services across Northern Ireland.’
software toolkit for QNLP capable of converting sentences into a quantum circuit. It is designed to accelerate the development of practical, real- world QNLP applications, including dialogue, text mining, language translation, text-to-speech, language generation and bioinformatics. The software was conceived, designed and engineered by Cambridge Quantum’s Oxford-based quantum computing research team, led by Chief Scientist Bob Coecke, with senior scientist Dr Dimitrios Kartsaklis, as the chief architect of the platform. lambeq, and QNLP more broadly, are the result of a research project stretching back over a decade. ‘Our team has been involved in foundational work that explores how quantum computers can be used to solve some of the most intractable problems in artificial intelligence,’ said Coecke. ‘This work was based on advances originally pioneered by me, Steve Clark, now CQ’s Head of AI, and others. NLP sits at the heart of these investigations. The release of lambeq is the natural next step after the publication a few months ago that provided details of the world’s first QNLP implementation by CQ on actual quantum computers, and our initial disclosure of the foundational principles in December 2019.’ lambeq is open-source and works with CQ’s TKET, a quantum software development platform that is also fully open-sourced. This provides QNLP developers with access to the broadest possible range of quantum computers. ‘In various papers published
[over] the past year we have not only provided details on how quantum computers can enhance NLP, but also demonstrated that QNLP is “quantum native”, meaning the compositional structure governing language is mathematically the same as that governing quantum systems,’ Coecke added. ‘This will ultimately move the world away from the current paradigm of AI that relies on brute force techniques that are opaque and approximate.’
Autumn 2021 Scientific Computing World 27
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