Investigating Quantum Approaches to Algorithm Privacy and Speech Processing

Quantum computing is becoming more accessible through modern noisy intermediate scale quantum (NISQ) devices. These devices require substantial error correction and scaling before they become capable of fulfilling many of the promises that quantum computing algorithms make. This work investigates the current state of NISQ devices by implementing multiple classical computing scenarios with a quantum analog to observe how current quantum technology can be leveraged to achieve different tasks. First, quantum homomorphic encryption (QHE) is applied to the quantum teleportation protocol to show that this form of algorithm security is possible to implement with modern quantum computing simulators. QHE is capable of completely obscuring a teleported state with a liner increase in the number of qubit gates O(n). Additionally, the circuit depth increases minimally by only a constant factor O(c) when using only stabilizer circuits. Quantum machine learning (QML) is another potential application of NISQ technology that can be used to modify classical AI. QML is investigated using quantum hybrid neural networks for the classification of spoken commands on live audio data. Additionally, an edge computing scenario is examined to profile the interactions between a quantum simulator acting as a cloud server and an embedded processor board at the network edge. It is not practical to embed NISQ processors at a network edge, so this paradigm is important to study for practical quantum computing systems. The quantum hybrid neural network (QNN) learned to classify audio with equivalent accuracy (~94%) to a classical recurrent neural network. Introducing quantum simulation slows the systems responsiveness because it takes significantly longer to process quantum simulations than a classical neural network. This work shows that it is viable to implement classical computing techniques with quantum algorithms, but that current NISQ processing is sub-optimal when compared to classical methods.