Confidential Client Information

Request for Disclosure

All records with regard to a student’s engagement in mental health treatment and/or services at the William & Mary Counseling Center are considered a part of their health record and are confidential. Records are maintained for 7 years past the last date on which the last service was provided. Information regarding contact with their center will not be disclosed to anyone outside of the Counseling Center without the client's written authorization to release the information except as mandated or allowed under Virginia law.

In situations where an exception to confidentiality protection may exist , the William & Mary Counseling Center will make an effort to discuss the circumstances and procedures for the disclosure with the client and enlist the client's assistance in resolution of the situation .

The release of records require the completion of their HIPPA compliant Consent to Release Information form properly signed by and Tested with the identity of the student. The form must be witnessed by someone who is not a blood relative.

Consent to Release Information form (PDF)

Use of the form is required to ensure they are meeting the standards of practice and law regarding your confidential information. A copy is also available from their administrative staff. Please note, signed release forms must be notarized or witnessed and submitted via regular mail to the Counseling Center with an original signature if you are unable to complete the form in person.

If mailing the form, please address the postage to:

William & Mary Counseling Center240 Gooch Dr.Williamsburg, VA 23185

After submitting a request, a counselor may call to verify the request and/or consult about the purpose of the release of records. Requests will be fulfilled in accordance with the law which provides for the timely and appropriate response. In order to ensure proper handling of records, responses may take up to 15 days and will not be provided on demand. Please ensure your contact information is accurate, as a delay in verification may postpone the release of records. Responses to requests for information contained in a confidential record will be delivered in person, via fax or via USPS Certified Mail due to their inability to ensure the security of email.

For more information on the Law on Patient Health Records see the Code of Virginia § 32.1-127.1:03 - Health records privacy.

Quinn Emanuel reports cyber attack involving 'limited' client data

A man types on a computer keyboard in Warsaw in this February 28, 2013 illustration file picture. REUTERS/Kacper Pempel Acquire Licensing Rights

(Reuters) - An electronic discovery vendor for U.S. law firm Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan suffered a cybersecurity attack that may have exposed client information, the firm disclosed to California authorities on Friday.

Quinn Emanuel confirmed to Reuters on Monday that "a third-party data center they use for document management for some of their clients became the victim of a ransomware attack" last year. It said the attack was "limited to a small portion of their clients and matters."

The firm did not identify the vendor. "The attack did not impact Quinn Emanuel's network infrastructure," it said in the statement.

The firm notified fewer than 2,000 individuals of the incident, according to a person familiar with the matter.

The business litigation firm, which has more than 1,000 lawyers, said in a notice filed with the California attorney general's office that an unknown party "accessed or acquired" data from the data center's network between May 13 and 14, 2022.

The unnamed vendor collects and processes the Los Angeles-founded law firm's e-discovery data, the notice said.

The notice, which is dated June 20, redacted information including any recipient and the type of personal information that may have been impacted in the attack.

"You may not have heard of QEUS, but they provide professional legal services to clients in a wide variety of industries and business sectors," the notice said. "In order to serve their clients, they collect relevant data from their clients and opposing parties."

The firm told Reuters it retained cyber and forensic experts to understand the scope of the attack and has worked with law enforcement authorities "to prevent further breaches and to recover the electronic discovery material."

The breach is the latest involving a third-party vendor that resulted in the potential exposure of a law firm's information.

Law firms including Jones Day and Goodwin Procter were ensnared in the wide-ranging breach at third-party file transfer vendor Accellion in 2021.

Law firms and other legal services providers that hold sensitive and confidential data have increasingly faced cybersecurity attacks involving their clients' data and their own business information.

Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe; Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft; Loeb & Loeb; and Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher also reported cybersecurity incidents to the California attorney general in July that took place in either 2022 or 2023.

Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner also recently experienced a data breach. Food giant Mondelez International, a client of the law firm, in June disclosed that there was unauthorized access to BCLP's systems between Feb. 23 and March 1, 2023.

BCLP and Mondelez have faced at least two lawsuits over the incident. The law firm was recently dropped from one of the lawsuits, and the company was dropped from the second one last week.

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

Sara Merken reports on the business of law, including legal innovation and law firms in New York and nationally.

QuEra Computing Inc. Hints At Moving From Analog To Digital Mode With 10,000 Qubits

Over the past decade, research has significantly advanced the science of quantum computing and led to the formation of many quantum startups. According to The Quantum Insider, the industry has grown to approximately 1,000 companies involved in some form of quantum technology. The long-term objective for quantum computing companies is to build large-scale, controllable, fault-tolerant quantum machines. However, that is a complicated process rife with difficult engineering and physics challenges that are yet to be solved.

I recently had the opportunity to talk to Yuval Boger, CMO for QuEra Computing. It had been a while since their last conversation, and I was looking forward to hearing about QuEra’s progress and its latest research efforts.

QuEra began as a startup in 2018 using technology developed by MIT and Harvard researchers. The company uses neutral-atom qubits for its Aquila quantum computer, which runs on a field-programmable qubit array (FPQA) processor, with up to 256 rubidium atoms for qubits. The FPQA architecture allows qubit configurations to be rearranged on demand without the need to change the hardware, which means that it could also be called a software-defined quantum computer. One of FPQA’s other unique features is that it can operate in a dual analog and digital mode.

Newly expanded access for customers

QuEra recently expanded how customers can use its quantum service. Since November 2022, customers have been able to access QuEra's system through Amazon Braket, a fully managed quantum computing cloud service designed for quantum computing research and software development.

At the beginning of this month, the company announced that customers can also use its quantum machines directly through QuEra’s Premium Access service. According to Boger, the new access method was created based on requests from QuEra customers. "Customers, including a national lab, have been asking for direct access to their system," Boger said. "While Braket is a great service, customers sometimes need the ability to work directly with their scientists. Basically, customers felt they could accomplish more by having direct communications with QuEra."

In the press release announcing these new options, QuEra CEO Alex Keesling had this to say: "As they ramp up the production capabilities and expand their exceptional team of application-focused scientists, we're thrilled to unlock additional avenues for engaging with their ground-breaking technology. The launch of their on-premise and premium access models stems directly from resonant customer demand. This pivotal move is not just a response but an exciting leap forward that opens a realm of new opportunities for their customers and for QuEra."

Although Premium Access costs more than the Braket option, Boger added that it is already a popular offering for many of QuEra’s customers. Boger also noted that as part of these offerings, QuEra can now provide clients with not only secure remote access, but also higher service level agreements and a reservation system that allows researchers to reserve machine time to avoid waiting for a turn.

QuEra also introduced a leasing option so that customers can have a QuEra quantum computer on-premises rather than accessing it remotely through the cloud.

"We are seeing an explosion of interest in national, regional and corporate users that want a quantum computer on site," Boger said. "It could be for various reasons such as national pride or a large defense contractor that doesn't trust anything on the cloud for security reasons and needs an air-gapped system. It could also be someone that just wants full control and doesn't want to wait in queue behind a large company with large jobs."

Digital vs. analog

Today's quantum computers use a variety of architectures and technologies to create basic quantum computation units called qubits. Common physical implementations of qubits include photons, atoms, ions trapped in electromagnetic fields and manufactured superconducting devices. The choice of qubits dictates operational factors such as temperature, type of control, applications and scalability.

Most well-known quantum computer companies use digital gate-based architectures and logic gates within circuits to control the quantum state of qubits. Here are a few companies that use gates: Atom Computing (neutral atoms), IBM (transmon superconductors) and IonQ and Quantinuum (trapped ions).

QuEra’s Aquila is not a gate-based quantum computer, at least not yet. QuEra’s machine is classified as an analog quantum computer because its qubits are manipulated by gradually fine-tuning the states.

QuEra’s qubits are created from rubidium-87 atoms by using the electron in the outer shell of each atom to encode quantum information. The electron can exist in a combination of two spin states that represent the 0 and 1 states of a qubit. QuEra's analog mode works well for optimizations, modeling quantum systems and machine learning.

QuEra’s hardware is complemented by Bloqade, the company’s open-source software development kit, which allows users to design, simulate and then execute programs. In more precise terms, Bloqade is an emulator for the Hamiltonian dynamics of neutral-atom quantum computers.

Rydberg states

Ordered atomic array held in an optical lattice Image

You can’t discuss QuEra’s analog quantum computer without talking explicitly about Rydberg states. These atomic states play a major role in QuEra’s architecture and deserve a bit more scientific explanation.

Rydberg states are created by boosting rubidium-87’s single valence electron to a very high energy level. Electrons normally orbit the nucleus at low energy levels and near the nucleus. But the outer electron in Rydberg atoms has an artificially-induced orbital radius that is sometimes thousands of times larger than normal. Because of Rydberg atoms’ large size and the distance between the outer electron and its nucleus, these atoms possess exaggerated properties that make them very sensitive to electric and magnetic fields.

QuEra uses Rydberg atoms’ outer electrons to create two qubit states. The interaction distance between Rydberg atoms allows a form of conditional logic. Atoms far apart can act independently, while atoms close to each other allow only one Rydberg excitation to occur. This limiting effect is called a Rydberg blockade. The point of all of this for QuEra is that flexible geometries and Rydberg blockades, guided by laser tuning controls, can be used to implement quantum algorithms.

In summary, QuEra’s neutral atoms provide reconfigurable and controllable qubits, and their interactions can create conditional logic. These features can be used for quantum simulation and optimization in ways that can’t be achieved with hardware qubits.

Shuttling

QueEra has developed a method to shuttle atoms to different locations while still maintaining its quantum states. Shuttling allows connectivity between the rubidium atoms to be reconfigured as needed to handle complex problems.

Three zones are involved in shuttling: the memory zone, where lower energy states with longer coherence are stored; the processing zone, where operations take place; and the measurement zone, where qubits can be isolated and read without disturbing other qubits.

Boger gave me a simple explanation of the zones that also suggests how QuEra’s next generation will handle qubit operations. “If you have these three zones, you don’t need 10,000 control lines for 10,000 qubits,” he said. “You can shuttle the qubits into the compute zone, then run it. Do the operation, then take it from there. It’s simple.”

QuEra’s shuttling is similar in concept and function to Quantinuum’s QCCD trapped-ion architecture. QuEra has also developed a fast transport method optimized to avoid motional heating of the atoms, which can cause a loss of fidelity in the shuttling process.

Scaling

If quantum computing is to fulfill its potential, they will need the capability to scale qubits into the millions. Of course, error correction will play a major role in reaching that number. Currently, the maximum number of qubits in use is around 500. But a number of companies, including QuEra, are expected to announce much more than that sometime soon.

When the issue of scaling came up during my discussion with Boger, I was surprised by how far QuEra had come. He showed me an image of 10,000 laser spots that can contain 10,000 atoms in a 100 x 100 array.

“Considering their current capabilities,” he said, “we believe they can get to at least 10,000 qubits without needing interconnects. The 10,000 laser spots on this image were created by the optical tweezers used to capture the atoms. Each atom is only three or four microns apart. It is also an advantage that their qubits function without cryogenic cooling.”

Seeing so many qubits in such a small area was impressive. Even so, to put 10,000 qubits into production will require error correction or, at a minimum, extremely effcient error mitigation.

The good news is that analog quantum computers require less error correction than digital gate-based machines. Still, putting such a high number of qubits into operation would also require higher qubit fidelities than possible today, even though QuEra’s collaborators at Harvard obtained a two-qubit gate fidelity of 99.5%.

Scaling a quantum computer to that level will require a great deal of clever physics, along with the precise engineering to put it into practice.

Topological

QuEra has also done some research with analog quantum simulation of topological matter. Without going into too much technical detail, topological matter refers to a class of quantum materials that have unique properties derived from their underlying topology. Among other benefits, topological matter can be resistant to noise, which could also make it useful for error resistance.

The existence of topological material was predicted theoretically more than five decades ago. It has taken fifty years just to determine that it actually exists—which should be an indication of how technically challenging it is going to be for anyone to develop topological qubits.

QuEra isn’t alone in researching the topic. Google published a paper in late 2021 describing the creation of topological ordered states using semiconductors. Earlier this year, Quantinuum announced a topological discovery of its own; the company has a full program dedicated to this research. After a rocky start a few years ago, Microsoft has re-announced its intentions to build a quantum computer using a hardware form of Majorana topological qubits.

Creating a useful topological quantum computer is likely to be ten or more years away, but I will be following topological advancements as they are made.

Maximum Independent Set (MIS)

QueEra’s optically trapped neutral atoms allow flexibility in qubit arrangements. Unlike in microchips, optical tweezers can position the atoms into any geometric 2-D position. Their arrangement relative to each other determines how the qubits interact—a key factor in quantum computing. Furthermore, tweezer control allows the connections to be dynamically reconfigured, which can alter properties of the quantum processor.

These advantages enable QuEra's 256-qubit quantum computer to use a unique method of solving optimization problems of the Maximum Independent Set (MIS) type. An MIS problem can be solved by mapping the geometry of the problem, such as the geographic layout of radio antennas, directly into the hardware. Many industrial problems are constrained by physical layouts, making them candidates for being solved as a MIS. There are a number of areas where MIS can be useful:

Future challenges

QuEra sees one of its future challenges as moving beyond small proofs-of-concept to larger quantum systems that demonstrate higher values and more impacts sooner. To support this, on top of using its FPQA and analog approach, QuEra has implemented hybrid quantum-classical algorithms for solving relevant problems.

One such demonstration optimized placements of gas stations across city locations by encoding the geometry of the problem into qubit positions, then measuring the system's ground state. The hybrid approach found solutions comparable to or slightly better than classical algorithms alone. While this is not definitive quantum advantage, it does indicate the feasibility of testing quantum optimization algorithms on real quantum hardware.

Wrapping up

Even though analog quantum computers can't ever match the capabilities of a universal gate-based quantum machines, there is a place for analog technology in the areas of simulation, optimization and machine learning. QuEra’s approach will be differentiated by the use of FPQAs to allow flexible encoding of problems directly into the qubit geometry.

Over a relatively short time, QuEra has assembled experts in the areas of chip-scale photonics, ultra-stable lasers and precision control systems. It has expertise in all the required areas of software, applications and algorithms needed to be successful in quantum. QuEra has over 50 employees working in the areas of hardware, software and business operations, and its MIT and Harvard heritage is a major asset for continued technical advancement.

QuEra’s neutral-atom analog quantum computer provides some capabilities unavailable with classical computers. However, it is not yet close to the technical requirements needed for a fault-tolerant quantum computer capable of solving world-class problems such as drug design or climate change. Currently, all quantum computers, whether analog or digital, still have technical problems to overcome in the areas of fidelity, scale and full error correction.

QuEra has identified its major sources of errors and it is working to reduce them. These include laser noise, atom motion, state decoherence and scattering, imperfect laser functioning and measurement errors.

After QuEra converts its architecture to a digital mode, there are several challenges that must be overcome before fault-tolerance becomes possible. Beyond large numbers of qubits and a high two-qubit gate fidelity, they don’t yet know what ratio will be needed between physical qubits and logical qubits. It will likely vary depending on which qubit technology is used. Google has done extensive work on error correction, scaling between 17 and 49 physical qubits per logical qubit. It believes, as QuEra does, that it will be possible to use logical qubits to build a large-scale error-corrected quantum computer.

QuEra’s future research will be directed at increasing the number of qubits, operation fidelities and levels of connectivity. My perspective is that QuEra is pushing the boundaries of analog quantum computing—and that its technology warrants attention. The company has a flexible architecture and intriguing capabilities, and its customers’ steady demands for easier and closer contact methods is reason enough to be optimistic about QuEra’s traction in the market.

However, QuEra and the entire industry face an immense technical challenge to raise quantum computing to its true potential. Achieving quantum advantage would be a great half-step and a signal that fault-tolerance is only a few years away.

Paul Smith-Goodson is the Vice President and Principal Analyst for Quantum Computing and Artificial Intelligence at Moor Insights & Strategy. You can follow him on Twitter for current information and insights about Quantum, AI, Electromagnetics, and Space.

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