Symposium

Quantum computing sits at a crossroads: extraordinary capital investment on one side, and modest near-term performance on the other. This session presents two complementary analyses that frame that tension.


Choice 1 — The Cost of Belief: surveys the financial landscape of quantum computing — spending by Google, IBM, and Microsoft, federal funding commitments, and venture capital trends — concluding that transformative potential remains contingent on solving error correction at scale before commercial advantage arrives.


Choice 2 — The Cost of Proof: grounds that promise in a concrete test, benchmarking two quantum classifiers (VQC and a Qiskit-based QNN) against a classical logistic regression baseline on a real healthcare dataset — where neither quantum model yet beats the classical benchmark, offering a grounded starting point for quantum curriculum development in Northwestern's MSDS program.