Embedded - 344: Superposition, Entanglement, and Interference

Episode Date: September 10, 2020

Kitty Yeung (@KittyArtPhysics) spoke with us about the superposition of quantum computing and fashion.  If you want to learn more about quantum computing, check out Kitty’s series on Hackaday’s  Quantum Computing Through Comics.  Kitty works for Microsoft in Quantum Computing (@MSFTQuantum). Kitty’s art and fashion are available on her site, Art By Physicist, and shop shop.kittyyeung.com. Her recent addition is the Constellation Dress. There is a coupon code in the show. Kitty has some other DIY fashion projects: Made of Mars and Saturn Dress. @artbyphysicist on Instagram  LinkedIn

Welcome to Embedded. I am Alicia White, alongside Christopher White. This week, we're going to talk about many things, physics, art, quantum computing, teaching, fashion. So I guess we have like six guests on? Oh, actually, given that list, we could really only have Kitty Young as our guest. Hi, Kitty. Thanks for joining us. Thank you so much for having me. Could you tell us about yourself? I am Kitty. I work as a senior program manager and creative technologist at Microsoft. I currently work on quantum computing

and I produce education materials for quantum computing. And I am a physicist, but I love art. So I have a fashion brand called Art by Physicist, which I design dresses and wearable technologies for. I'm hoping we get to talk about all of that, but I also am hoping we don't end up with a three-hour long show. So before we get started, we want to do lightning round where we ask you short questions. We want short answers, and if we're behaving ourselves, we won't say, are you sure, and

how, and why, and where can I get one? Christopher, will you go first? Sure. The Copenhagen Interpretation, fact or fiction? Neither is the interpretation. She does work in quantum mechanics. Would you rather complete one project or start a dozen? Complete one project.

There's two options for this question. I will ask you it the one way, and then if you don't like it, I'll ask a different meta question. How many electrons are in a chicken? I don't know. That's the short answer. Is that a fair question to ask a master's candidate? Master's in physics. Yes, yes, yes. Define fair.

You need to give them additional information for them to calculate. Great, thank you, thank you. Like the weight of the chicken? I feel much better now. Density? Assuming it's mostly water. Yeah. Do you have a favorite acronym?

No, I don't like acronyms. Do giraffes make sense? Yeah, totally. Do you have a favorite fictional robot? I like Marvin from the 2005 version of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. And do you have a tip everyone should know? I would recommend everyone teach their kids automation. Why automation?

It's going to be very useful if they have a hobby they want to do. They can have some of the labors done with machines and they can do more creative work okay so professionally your primary method of earning money what do you do i work at microsoft as a physicist and a program manager and that's my day job and I love that too because it allows me to stay as a technical physicist um okay so at Microsoft Physicist you work in quantum computing what does that mean um it means different for different people working in the group. So I manage the education effort for the quantum computing content. So I manage the documentation and create the MS Learn education materials. And also I teach.

I teach the community community sometimes give workshops so for different people we have a lot of different roles in quantum computing so there are researchers there are also programmers there are a lot of program managers that need to help create products. So my role is quite unique and fun to produce materials that we need to communicate to people because this is relatively still an emerging technology and emerging industry. We need to give people the learning that they need in order to solve their problems using quantum computing or learn the materials in order to become the next generation of quantum computing workforce. What would I do with the quantum computer other than crack passwords? Yeah, Schwarz's algorithm is definitely one of the interesting ones that has an application.

So it's maybe a negative application because using Shor's algorithm, you can very quickly break, as you said, the RSA encryption method. But that also means that we need to come up with better algorithms to have more secure encryption methods. And other than that, there are a lot of problems that our current classical computers are not able to solve. Even some problems our most powerful supercomputers can run into limitations.

So things like simulation for chemical materials, discovery, drugs, those are relying on fundamental quantum mechanical interactions. So maybe the best computers still struggle when we try to simulate and run simulations to understand materials and coming up with designs of these materials. There are also some problems that are not fundamentally quantum. They are classical problems, but we run into every day like optimization and cryptography you already mentioned and data processing. offers to solve these problems using quantum-inspired or quantum mechanical method to represent those problems and solve them more efficiently.

The sorts of problems we're talking about, are these the ones that in CS are called NP-hard or PSPACE-complete? Yeah, there are quite a lot of them. I mean, can quantum actually solve that level of problem? There's ongoing research. And this is definitely a developing field that a lot of researchers are trying to come up with new algorithms to solve these classically unsolvable problems. Okay, so I come to you with a problem. Like there are some origami folding methods that are determining whether or not they're foldable is, is definitely harder than NP complete.

Maybe, maybe PSPACE complete. So how, how do I, what do I do? I mean, quantum computing has always been this thing that it's like- Maybe we should back up and talk about what quantum computing is. Well, I mean, it's obviously computing with quanta. Yeah. Because it's completely different from from normal uh normal computing methods yeah like normal computing classical computing we rely on bits that's like using transistors on and off

but in quantum computing you can leverage this superposition of different states. So it's not just 0 or 1. You can have 0 and 1 in superposition or linear combination. So you have a probability of having 0 and a probability of having 1 in your qubit system. So in this way, you can actually have two effects coming out. Due to superposition, you can have interference of amplitudes between these different states. And you can also have entanglements between qubits. So entanglement means that when you put them into a specially arranged configuration,

you can measure one of the qubits without measuring the other one. You already know the result of the other one. Their results are correlated. So that, you can imagine, could be very useful in quantum communication. And interference allows you to extract this powerfulness of the quantum computing that you can let more likely results

to come out and the less likely results will be cancelled each other out. So you can get this interference between amplitudes. So quantum computing is a clever way for you to leverage these three concepts. You can write algorithms to let your qubits represent the data. You can encode whatever number or text into your qubits and then feed that into some algorithm that allows you to do this interference and entanglement. And very efficiently at the end, you can get the type of data that you desire. It's not going to be faster. It's not going to be like, I think a lot of confusion around parallel computing is not going to be always faster than all of the existing classical algorithms.

But for certain problems, you can leverage superposition, entanglement, and interference to take advantage of. Okay, I'm going to go back to origami because it's something I understand. I don't to origami because it's something I understand. When you start out with a piece of paper, you can get a crease pattern from various places. And there are mountain and valley folds. And that is part of the crease pattern, usually. But there's this idea that you can have a whole bunch of lines on the paper that should represent mountain and valley folds, but you don't know. You don't know which it is. Is it up or down? And then the question becomes, is this a foldable

pattern? What does it fold into if you don't know which are up and down? What are the possible folds? And so it sounds like the, what you're talking about with the probability, if I set all of the folds to 50% up, 50% down, and then I entangle some of the points so that if two points are on an edge, they have to go up or down themselves is this am i am i thinking about this right i know i know this is putting it in a different frame but that's a very interesting question yeah i think there might be two ways to think about this uh i'm not an expert in origami uh me neither really i guess it would depend on the type of problem you want to solve with your fold um like so kind of representing your troves and valleys with your uh with amplitudes

uh yeah i i don't think this problem is a quantum mechanical problem, but you can, if you want to play with interference, perhaps, you can represent it in a way. But the other thing that I can think of that quantum can perhaps help is not strictly quantum computing using interference and entanglement. It's more like learning from quantum mechanical reactions and then represent your system with a Hamiltonian that can allow you to find the minimum energy state. This I know that has been applied to origami,

that how do you fold a piece of paper into a certain shape? How much energy would that take? And what is the minimum energy number of folds or whatever configuration that your system is the most comfortable and most likely to be in? Perhaps this could be a question you can represent with a quantum-inspired optimization problem. So perhaps you can write the Hamiltonian of your system and solve it as a matrix to do a minimal energy, like an eigenenergy, eigenvalue type of calculation. That could be something interesting to explore.

Yes, although setting up the Hamiltonian is actually the hard part here. Yeah, sure. Because there are too many options. It's, you know, if you have one fold on a paper, it's either a mountain or a valley. If you have two and they cross, now you can do some interesting things. And if you have a hundred, it just

gets impossible. I want to interject and just say that this conversation makes me so happy. Yeah, I think we've won quantum bingo already with Hamiltonian. You know, it's been 344 episodes and finally somebody's mentioned Hamiltonian. I was wondering if I should mention it.

Okay. Yeah. One of you explain what a Hamiltonian is. I'll let the first one with the PhD do it. I would just explain it in a pretty high level that is a way for you to capture the behavior and state of your system is basically it has the unit of energy so say for example some uh a thought experiment if you want to roll down a ball from a mountain down to the valley, is converting from a high potential energy state to a high kinetic energy state as it rolls down and speeds up. And both the kinetic energy and potential energy can be captured in Hamiltonian as two terms. And in quantum mechanics, you need to work out the energy of your, say, a hydrogen molecule.

You write it into a Schrodinger's equation, and it tells you how your system behaves and the Schrodinger equations solution will include the energy, the potential energy or kinetic energy or some other terms in your system and also the wave function that can describe how your quantum mechanical state

behaves. Okay. I have more origami questions but I need to, I should have behaves. Okay. I have more origami questions, but... I need to, I should have wrote more about it. No, I didn't even put it in the outlet. I mean, the reason it's interesting from a quantum perspective is some of the problems that come up with paper are way more complex when you apply them to proteins, and protein folding is really interesting interesting but it's also unbelievably difficult to predict so can you give us an example of a like the simplest what's the hello world of quantum computing depending on the type of problem you want to solve. So if it is a hello world to test if your system

is in a quantum state, you could use like a teleportation demonstration. Yes, yes. A hello world of quantum computing is a teleportation demonstration. That is the best. So if you can show your system,

if you had two qubits and if you can show your system, if you had two qubits, and if you can show that they can teleport, and that means you can entangle them, and that also means you have put it in a quantum state. But there are things that are much simpler. So we have the Qsharp language that we can use to... Of course, I was going to ask and I was going to make a joke that it was going to be Qsharp and it was.

Yeah, like you don't have to get into the hardware and the internal working of a qubit to do quantum programming. So we have this whole set of libraries and everything that you need as a new language for computation, we have one designed for quantum computer. We can use Qsharp to program any type of quantum computers and you can just simply write some code and say hello world and perhaps you can write like a simple entanglement or superposition code to demonstrate that's probably kind of a hello world

for it is Qsharp something somebody can play with without a quantum computer can it be simulated yeah and all that you can find on Microsoft's documentation quantum documentation just search Microsoft And all that you can find on Microsoft's documentation, quantum documentation.

Just search Microsoft quantum documentation, and there's the whole list of Qsharp documentation. And it has the simulation, and we also have the cloud computing service, the actual quantum service that allows people to write code on your own computer, but then connect to a quantum computer through the cloud and then program it that way. He is so excited right now. I cannot tell you. Yes, you should jump on it and try it. We have a lot of free learning materials, GitHub, open source. You can even write anything right now and contribute to the github repositories okay i want to talk about that but first i want to talk about the quantum computer itself i mean mentally i remember having uh wet uh chemical computers described to me long ago where you put a problem into like a protein and then you shake it around and it turns colors to answer your question.

And I remember there were DNA-based computers to set up a particular strand of DNA and it would solve a problem. Yeah. So, my mental model of quantum computers involves shoving electrons in places and shaking them, which I don't think is right. What does the hardware look like? How do you build a quantum computer? There are different types. There are different kinds of architecture. The commonly built ones that's pursued by industry and some academics, there's the superconducting circuits, which is CMOS-fabricated using conductors and inductors, and you can create a resonance in your circuit,

and that you can use to represent your qubit states in a superposition, and you can entangle them. We also have trapped irons, which are using iron that have spins. You can define certain spin to be, or certain spin energy to be your zero state and another one to be one state. And you can manipulate that to go up and down

and you can put them in superposition so basically you need a two-level system that you can control and make because they're already quantum mechanical systems their energy levels are already in superposition and then you need a way to manipulate which state they are on mic Microsoft is building this topological type of quantum computing. So it's a stack of materials that's got like superconductors, semiconductors, insulators stacked together. And you can create this special state for electrons to occupy. And at certain places on the nanowire, you can create those states. And when they're occupied, your qubit can be in the zero or one state.

If they're empty, it could be zero state. So it's using many, many many electrons interaction between each other and extracting this topological behavior of your system to represent your zero set ones so there are different types and their pros and cons between all of them so the industry is definitely working very hard to build more and more scalable ones to use them for different applications. Scalable, that's the word. So those all sound like things you build individually, not like transistors, which you just buy a chip full of them.

Yeah, because transistors have been very, very mature in decades. How many of these are in a computer? How many of these? I assume quantum computing is kind of like Azure that you log in and you get some time on a quantum computer? Yeah, that's right. So how many... How many qubits?

How many qubits? That's right. How many qubits can I have? It depends on the companies too. I think those numbers we can probably find online is not that important, actually. How many qubits can you have? It's more about if you can scale them and build certain tasks to solve them, certain problems that you can use them to solve, and if they can be entangled.

Because you could have a lot of qubits but none of them is entangled, so that's useless. There's also error correction you have to take into account. So the actual number of qubits that you need for a algorithm is much smaller than the actual numbers that you need to take into account error corrections. Stupid probability. Yeah, so you want to have a robust hardware system

so that you can minimize the actual qubits that you need, but it's very difficult. So as part of setting up a quantum computing problem, I'm designing the algorithm. I'm inputting it into the computer very, very difficultly through Qsharp, which I'm sure is easy. And then I run it, and the results are kind of instantaneous, right? Right. Either you get the answer or a demon appears and eats you. I'm always worried about that. Well, any computation takes time.

Okay, so that is a myth in my head, that quantum computing, because it works... Instantaneously? No, because it's all probabilities. It should just, I mean, they should entangle, they should interfere, and then I should get the answer. I mean, how long can that possibly take? Well, you have to put them into the actual hardware and also you need to compare

what algorithms you're doing. I can give you a scale, like the Groover's search algorithm, which is an algorithm that's using entanglement and interference and is trying to find items that you're looking for on an ordered list.

So I like to give people this metaphor. It's like you're looking for a book in the library. You know the title, but this library is very disorganized. Everything is just not ordered at all. So if you are using a classical algorithm, then you have to kind of look at each item one by one. If you are lucky, the first one is what you're looking for. But if you are unlucky, maybe the last one is what you're looking for. So then if you have n books, then you have to look at it like

n times. If you are using Groover's algorithm, which is letting you feed all of your books into your entanglement and interference box, then the books that you're not looking for are kind of canceling each other out. And when you output, one that you're looking for has a really sharp peak and you can identify the item. And that could be much faster.

You don't have to look at every single book one by one. So the classical algorithm scales with 2 to the n if you have n bits, but the Groover's algorithm has a scale of 2 to the n over 2 if you have n qubits.

Oh, it's better. If you have a very large n, then you will see Goobers will have a much... Oh, the exponent is n over 2. Yeah, exactly. So you don't know the absolute factor. If you run the algorithm once,

how long it will take. But you can see that if n is big enough, then Goobers will be advantageous. So it's like a competition between the fastest supercomputer and the fastest quantum computer. I think we're reaching the point where I want

to whiteboard and understand better. But you've already done that. You've been teaching that both for Microsoft and for Hackaday. How does that work? How does that work? Yeah, I've been teaching on Sundays at Hackaday U since April I started teaching this.

It was just quite spontaneous. I wanted to draw a lot of the understandings I had about what I love to do. And quantum computing is what I wanted to represent with comics. And then Hackaday started this ask for content that during the pandemic, we wanted to offer the community some new learning. Then quantum computing is a great topic for that. So I actually started teaching people during the whole lockdown. And it's been, I guess, tomorrow will be the 20th session that I will teach. And then Microsoft Reactor is also promoting the event. So it became like a

co-host thing for Hackaday and Microsoft Reactor. We got a lot of community from different channels that's joining the class every Sunday. And it's recorded so people can catch up and then join the class live. Yeah, yeah, exactly. We are teaching through Teams. I draw a piece of comic every week. So before people join the class, they can see the comics. They know what topics we're going to talk about. And all of the slides are saved and uploaded on hackaday.io i have a project called

quantum computing through comics and people can find all of the recording links there too and the hackaday folks wanted me to mention that they're currently hiring teachers for all topics related to engineering hard science and math people can email superconference at hackaday.io. So you'll be getting more compatriots. Great. And you've mentioned the comic. What made you decide to do a comic book style instead of Visio or other more traditional methods?

I think comic is quite traditional. I hand drew everything. It's just an art form that I'm very comfortable with and I love doing. I've been drawing as long as I can remember. So I was a kid, I started drawing and I've always been using comics and graphic novel style to convey ideas. So this became a natural choice of a media for me. So I also wanted to present quantum computing not in a very heavy way, because to some people it could sound a bit intimidating.

I think there's a lot of myth and hype about it that is not necessary. Actually, quantum computing is not that hard. We just have to explain it clearly and not in an intimidating way. So the comics actually played a pretty important role in drawing people's interests and kind of people stopped thinking that's a really hard thing

that they can't do anymore. So I'm very happy about the effect. Making it approachable is very important yes your your comics often have a cat in them is the cat named schrodinger or does the cat have a different name oh good question so you can't know different characters. The name, yes. Well, that is from Schrodinger's original joke. I think he actually came up with the metaphor to mock quantum ideas.

That if you put a cat in a box, the key here is that in the box, you have a radioactive mechanism that is itself quantum and that can trigger a poison to be spilled or not. So if the cat drinks the poison, it will be dead. If the cat doesn't, then it will be alive. But you will never know until you open the box and see what the result is. But the key here is that it it is triggered by a quantum mechanical reaction is not just any any cat in a box right so no just putting a cat in the comics actually has many characters I recently made a

page that tells people their names and they can actually use it as a game that they can look at the name and what they do so I have personas. I have a researcher who comes up with algorithms. I have programmers who come up with applications and write problem into a quantum computing solution. And there are early adopters, there are learners. They all have different names. So people can use that page to identify who they are and in which class they appear i want to encourage people to do this and then they can watch that whole

exercise whole class and then write down what they learn in a way drive people to really understand the class so if anyone sends me their thinking, I can even give them like a certificate. It's called an out-of-the-box thinker certificate. I like that. We've got Alice and Bob and a referee. Okay, I shouldn't be reading this now. I should be paying attention. The comic style really does make it quite approachable. Quantum has been something that's quite intimidating. I mean, you say the word quantum and like... It's so cool, though. Sorry.

It just is scary. Cool and scary. But, you know, spooky action at a distance. This isn't real. I'm not doing this. Yeah, but those parts are all... A lot of those go into interpretation of what this all means, whereas the actual mechanics of doing quantum,

that's the part I like. All the other stuff is, you know, that's for cosmologists to figure out. Yeah, I think it's probably, we physicists didn't do a good job explaining a lot of things. And we should make it more accessible but not hype it not make it sound so mysterious that if you don't have a phd in something sciencey you can't learn it but the is, if you're passionate and curious about it

and you focus on the concepts, you can very quickly get started using a quantum computer. So I think, yeah, we need to do a better job demystifying it. So this seems like, you know, you teach and you teach for microsoft you're doing teaching for hackaday and you do physics um but that's like like okay so that's your day job at night you put on a superhero costume and and do other things yeah at night i think i'm on a on the opposite shift now that uh at night i need to work with my colleagues in the u.s right yeah but in my spare time if i can find it i'll do some creative work like design fashion and paint do some other graphic novel drawings. And I also do music. I play the piano

and the harp and also sing. What planet are you from? Tell us. I'm from the moon, not the planet. Okay, so music. Classical? I mean, harp and piano is usually classical. Okay. Well, yeah, I love jazz as well, but I am classically trained. So most of the pieces I play are from the classical and romantic eras. But the fashion part. When did your art turn to fashion? That was a few years ago. I guess when I was finishing my PhD, I finished all the hands-on experimental parts and I was just writing my thesis then. And I really wanted to make something by hand and learn some new skills. I decided to buy a sewing machine and some books and learn some classes from YouTube and started sewing. Even my first piece was a design that I drew on the paper.

I've always been designing for my graphic novel characters especially. So I wanted to turn those ideas into reality. I also paint a lot of nature scenes, astronomical scenes. I have a set of digital paintings that I have on my website. So I started looking at places where I can print them into very large fabrics. Then I started making dresses that have my paintings on them. They're really large pieces that like a whole dress is showing the earth or showing Saturn, the planet. And on the side, I was playing with these open source hardware did some robotics projects with friends so i thought why can't i combine the two i can i can put the electronics

into clothes and why not so that's when i started merging different areas and so now you have dresses that light up yeah Yeah, it was fun. It was quite natural. When you're a maker, you do things by hand and you can put something very quickly together when you have an idea. But the hard part was actually turning those ideas, prototypes into products.

And that's really triggered my curiosity. When people ask me where to buy my designs, I really didn't know how that whole design And that's really triggered my curiosity. When people asked me where to buy my designs, I really didn't know how that whole design to manufacturing process worked. Then I started looking into manufacturing, and there were a lot of problems and crazy problems in the fashion industry. So turning my original handmade thing into a product took quite a while. What kind of problems? I mean, thinking about moving something from a maker to a production system,

I believe Alan wrote a book about that. But how is it different for fashion and manufacturing? Or how is it the same? Yeah, fashion industry is very, very old. We've been making clothes for thousands of years. And we have been making clothes pretty much the same way in the past 100 to 200 years after the first industrial revolution, when it helped the industry do things mass scale mass production of repeated units so if you are a new designer coming into the space it's very difficult to find manufacturers who can support small scale that can allow you to test the market first to build your maybe crazy handmade interesting designs into products that was the first hurdle that i came across

and then i also found out that how pollutive that whole mass production method is because the manufacturing is forcing everyone to mass produce you basically have to have a really large quantity in order to build a brand but then brands never know how much they can sell anything there's not really any good prediction of the market so they would try to guess how much something could sell but they don't want to lose the profit then they would try to guess how much something could sell but they don't want to lose the profit then they would over produce and it turned out that the clothes that's over produced every year that's not never sold is 30 percent globally wow yeah and what do those brands do they may donate it they may sell them at lower prices but we don't actually know how much they would send to landfill or each brand we don't know how

much they would send to landfill or burn them but we know that globally 10 of carbon footprint comes from the fashion industry so each brand will spend tens of billions of dollars making their new designs this season. And then they need to try very hard to get rid of them. So yeah, it's quite sad to find out all of this. As an engineer, I think there are solutions. It's quite shocking, to be honest, that as an engineer coming to the fashion industry

and seeing all these problems, you think that there are actually solutions, there are ways that we can solve them. We need to support creative designers to turn their ideas into reality. We also need to get rid of the waste and pollution yeah i mean we almost need to make on on demand so that you don't end up with extra stuff exactly and we need to stop convincing people that they need to buy things just to buy them

exactly it has to go to this we need to go go back to made to order where before it was all mass produced, everyone had to go to a tailor and get something custom made for them. But it's very, very slow. And we still have that. Yeah, expensive. We still have that system. if you want for special occasions you may wear something like that but for every day where we need to change this day uh this mass produced model we have the technology now that in the 21st century we have all these front and back end technologies we need to connect together to not just predict the market, but also allowing consumers to directly tell designers and fashion brands what they want. Then the manufacturer can just make them for the particular customer.

And we have to build it in a scalable way that's able to reduce the cost because at the beginning if you're making one piece for one person it would be expensive but if you build a whole supply chain when it's mature it's not going to be that expensive and i know there are some vendors that do this now slowly slowly is um i think it has to be uh everyone has to do it everyone should use technology in their design and manufacturing process shorten the development time so that they can allow creative designers turn their ideas into real products quickly. So actually, I would use 3D printing as an example. This is an industry that was very new and only took a few years to get to this mature stage.

Now everyone can buy a 3D printer or they can send it to some service online. They can do design on a computer software. Then they can send any model online to get it produced. And they can just pay for materials and shipping. Clothing needs to get there, like 3D printing. If designers can design everything digitally, that means we need to have a standard,

and we need to capture all of these materials, trains, all the details that's in the tech pack digitally. Then the designers can do everything online and through the cloud. They can submit their designs and find the manufacturers that is closest to their consumers. So you can get things created more locally this sounds like a huge problem i mean this sounds like there are so many yeah okay it'll take decades i think it yeah it's not just uh the technology i was i would say the technology is pretty much there. We just have to connect them. And a lot of our existing technologies that could help, like computer vision, 3D simulation,

they need to be applied in the fashion industry. And they need to be connected to the physical manufacturing. So we need an infrastructure and network to do that. But technically, I think it's totally doable manufacturing so we need an infrastructure and network to do that but the tech technically i think is totally doable if one of the big places decides to completely do it they can and they need but then is also called a cultural change culture shift We need to convince the traditional fashion industry to adopt the technology and also consumers to understand the problem.

And they can drive the demand for this made-to-order. Is your fashion career going to become your day job? Definitely not completely fashion. It has to be fashion tech. Without technology, I don't think fashion fashion yeah is is there for a long time and i don't think i need to do pure fashion but fashion tech

has a lot of potential do you worry about being pigeonholed in social media or in real life as a fashion person and not a, quote, real engineer? Maybe the opposite. I might be pigeonholed as a scientist and someone who just do their research and do their experiments, but not creative enough. But I want to do both. I want to use both my technical skills and creative skills. And I'm integrating the two through everything I do now. You have a shop where you do sell your fashions and paintings. Can you tell us the name of it? Yeah, the brand is called Art by Physicist.

The URL is shop.kittyyoung.com so basically if you just type kitty young my name dot com it will pop up and of course that will be in the show notes great uh you have dresses that light up you have some dresses that don't you have some dresses that are just you send fabric and instructions. How do you decide whether something is a do-it-yourself dress or one that you create fully? Yeah, I am a proponent of open source. So I want to make fashion also part of the open source ecosystem. I wanted to be as open as possible and modularize them. For creative people, they can get a piece of fabric with the patterns and the graphics already printed on the fabrics so they can cut and sew themselves.

If it's a simple piece i would do that and let creative people sew and do the if if they enjoy sewing they they can buy those fabrics and for some more complicated ones it is harder for people to do it by hand so i would develop them into a full product where people can purchase ready-to-wear. I try to make them as modular and open-source as possible. All of the clothes are my own paintings. My hand-painted graphics are printed on the fabrics. Then I would overlay the patterns on them so they have the correct layout so i'm really kind of engineering clothing like you would design

a piece of hardware a chip say and that's actually what i used to do was designing components on silicon photonic chips. So there is a lot of similarity to me. I treat a piece of fabric like a substrate, and then I lay things on top of it. I print my paintings, and then eventually, for some designs that make sense to add electronics, I would add, say, this starry night dress is a painting of the constellations and it makes sense to add some leds so it lights up nicely and decorates it i recently launched just a couple days ago yeah this yeah thanks this new dress is inspired by astronomical images of Earth in space, where you can see sunrise and the moon going around Earth. Those beautiful NASA images you can easily find online. I'm always drawn into this beautiful space, starry nights, and nature.

So I wanted to design a dress that represents that. So it has a piece of LED matrix panel inside the dress. This is a collaboration between my brand and Lumen Couture, which is my friend Chelsea Klukas' brand. We put this together using the LEDs to allow you to actually draw and upload any videos, images, or GIFs. And then I simulated this moon going around the earth on the dress. You can see city lights on the earth area and also see sunrise gradually lighting up the earth. So I think the effect is quite nice.

So I'm very happy about this new release. And that one is a ready-to-wear, isn't it? Yes, this one is a ready-to-wear, isn't it? Yes, this one is a ready-to-wear. And it has an LED panel. Mm-hmm. I guess it's just removable for washing? Yes. Okay.

Yeah. You have to kind of design things based on the hardware and the electronics that's available. There is an industry that's developing more wearable electronics. It's still being developed. It's not quite mature there. There are companies that are making flexible electronics and washable electronics, flexible washable batteries there is a quite nice industry that's working on this but they're not still not quite ready for the complete integration with

fabrics so this i i think is a very interesting research area how do you decide whether to manufacture these yourself or just put them up online for other people to make i actually make all of them open source a lot of these that you see that are already ready to wear a couple years ago they're just open source projects. I would first make them myself by hand. And then I would write tutorials to teach people how to make something similar. So on websites like Hexter.io, Hackaday.io, Instructables, you can find my projects. For anyone who's a maker and interested in building something similar they can find all the components that's needed the construction instructions and the code that you can download and even 3d models sometimes i use 3d printing for accessories and designs so people can download them and make them themselves. And then converting them into actual products is a whole set of work.

And I am intrigued by the whole process. And I really like seeing things come to fruition, come to life as a product that maybe people other than makers want to have and that can also inspire people what's possible in the industry so my designs are three collections nature science future nature are all the paintings of beautiful places i've been and got flowers and fish all these nice sceneries that i really love so i would i go somewhere and i see them i will paint them then i would turn them into designs people can those. And then I have the science ones that are astronomy, science. I have a Schrodinger's cat earring.

So some of these have electronics that people can buy or they can find those DIY instructions to build some themselves. And the future one are the ones that are really elaborately futuristic. So they are not, the manufacturers are not ready to make them because a lot of these are hand-sewn. I had to cut each piece by hand and then sew them together

and solder the LEDs piece by piece and program them. So those are the ones that are really made for makers that they can look at the free tutorials. If they want to build something similar, they can do that. So they are called Future. I hope that in the future, the industry would, the manufacturers would look at those creative designs, then they can support creative designers to make them into products. I would be blown away by either your quantum computing career or your fashion career. And it is just so much more that you're doing both. I'm just looking forward to quantum fashion.

I don't know what that means. Yes, it is possible. I do have one. I mentioned earlier that Schrodinger's cat earring. Yeah, it's a 3D design. One side is a dead cat, a skeleton. The other side is a life. Oh, okay.

I didn't see that. I didn't see that. That's cool. Yeah. So it's possible. I think the point here is alive. Oh, okay. I didn't see that. I didn't see that. That's cool. Yeah. So it's awesome. I think the thing here is it's all made to order, like 3D printed accessories. It's so wonderful that you don't have any inventory. You don't have any waste.

You produce them when your customer orders it online. I think clothing has to go that way. Let's see. One more question. Do you have a book coming out? I have my comics, the quantum computing comics that I'm putting together like a little book. It's also a notebook so people can order it from Amazon very, very soon. I should probably launch it on my website

and also tell people about it through Hackaday. Then people can order the book with all the comics. So every page has a little comic. They can learn something. On the other side is empty. They can write notes on. People should watch and stay tuned on the Hackaday Quantum Computing with Comics through Comics project.

I would announce some exciting new releases soon. Cool. Kitty, do you have any thoughts you'd like to leave us with? Thank you guys so much for inviting me to speak on your podcast. This is a very nice platform. It has been great talking with you. It's nice to meet you. Thank you so much. Our guest has been Dr. Kitty Young, Senior Program Manager at Microsoft Quantum Systems,

producer of MS Learn Quantum Modules, creator of the comic series Quantum Computing Through Comics, soon to be a book, lecturer at Hackaday and Microsoft Reactor, founder and designer of sustainable and steam fashion brand Art by Physicist, and creative technologist and lead of the fashion hack at Microsoft. Kitty has created a 10% discount code for Embedded FM listeners. You can use Embedded FM on www.kittyyoung.com for any order over $50, one per customer. Thanks, Kitty. This was absolutely fascinating. Thank you so much. Thank you to Christopher for producing and co-hosting. Thank you to Helen and Sophie for recommending Kitty.

And thank you for listening. You can always contact us at showandembedded.fm or hit the contact link on embedded.fm. Remember, if you heard something, but you're not quite sure what it was, you can now get a transcript. And a quote to leave you with. This comes from the amorphous internet. Don't compare your inside to someone else's outside. Embedded is an independently produced radio show that focuses on the many aspects of engineering.

It is a production of Logical Elegance, an embedded software consulting company in California. Thank you.