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 practical applications from business (supply chain, finance), engineering (communication networks), and medicine (cancer genomics, image recognition). At the Tepper Quantum Technologies Group, we are exploring the twin questions: (a) What can quantum do for OR/MS; and (b) what can OR/MS do for quantum. This article—a companion to my 2025 INFORMS Keynote and not intended as a comprehensive survey of the field but rather as a selective perspective organized around illustrative examples from our group—provides a brief summary of our research spanning algorithms, hardware, and applications (AHA). I hope that it helps illustrate how we can contribute to the Second Quantum Revolution.

History: Yu Ding served as the senior editor for this article.