Dear UMBC Community,

Retriever Integrated Health is hosting a  Quantiferon (TB blood test) Clinic in partnership with Quest Diagnostics. This clinic is designed to make it easy for students, faculty, and staff who need TB screening to get it done on campus.

Clinic Details

• Dates: September 8 – September 17

• Location: Center for Well-Being

• Hours: 9:00 AM – 4:00 PM

• Book Appointment: umbc.setmore.com/tbclinic

The Affiliates Programs exist to facilitate a strong sense of community and connection among students in the College of Engineering and Information Technology (COEIT).

CWIT Affiliates are undergraduate students majoring in engineering and computing. CWIT Affiliates get access to workshops that focus on your professional and personal development, networking and mentorship opportunities, the opportunity to attend conferences and gain presentation experience, as well as community and connection with other COEIT students interested in CWIT's mission and who share the same passions. For further information, please reach out to cwitaffiliates@umbc.edu.

Register to be a CWIT Affiliate here!

The Graduate Student Association is relaunching our official social media accounts on Instagram and X.

Instagram: @umbc_gsa

X: @UMBCGSA

Stay plugged in for advocacy updates, upcoming events, leadership opportunities, and ways to connect with the graduate community at UMBC.

Follow us, join the conversation, and help shape the grad student experience. This is your space—be part of it.

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Train delays can cascade into stalled commutes, economic losses, and vacation snags. Scheduling trains is computationally complex, though: It can take hours or days to solve large transportation networks on traditional computers, when disruptions like train breakdowns or traffic accidents demand much quicker solutions. A new study led by UMBC researchers—and focused on Baltimore’s Light RailLink, a hybrid tram-rail network sharing roads with cars inside Baltimore City—harnesses quantum computing to address this challenge, using an approach that blends physics, computer science, and mathematics.

In their new paper, Sebastian Deffner, associate professor of physics; postdoctoral fellow Emery Doucet; doctoral candidate Reece Robertson; and collaborators Krzysztof Domino and Bartłomiej Gardas at the Institute of Theoretical and Applied Informatics in the Polish Academy of Sciences tested whether quantum devices could manage train schedules under real-world conditions. The team leveraged the “noise” inherent in quantum computers—random, unwanted disturbances that cause an effect similar to radio static—to model unpredictable train travel times. 

Their results suggest that quantum computers can solve transportation scheduling problems, but more advanced hardware is needed to make using quantum devices practical, especially for larger networks. 

Randomness on the rails

Doucet and Robertson discussed the work at Baltimore’s Camden Yards LightRail Link Station, while Orioles baseball fans unloaded from trains at regular intervals and delivery trucks rumbled by. Their enthusiasm cut through the urban din, their voices rising over the clatter and clank of passing Baltimore Light RailLink cars.

“How long it takes you to get between two stations where you have a lot of shared infrastructure in between—you can’t really predict that precisely,” Doucet says, gesturing toward the tracks and their intersection with a nearby stoplight. This randomness complicates scheduling, but the team’s diverse expertise—spanning theoretical physics, algorithm design, and quantum hardware—facilitated creative solutions.

Noisy doesn’t have to be bad

Current quantum computers are classified as “NISQ,” or “noisy intermediate-scale quantum,”  pronounced “nisk.” That means they’re error-prone with only moderate power. Rather than fighting the noise, though, the researchers used it to mimic everyday randomness, like traffic delays. 

“The ‘N’ in NISQ stands for ‘noisy,’ but that doesn’t mean that the noise has to always be deleterious,” Doucet explains. “We wondered if maybe we could use the noise that the device is subject to as a tool to model the chaos and randomness.”

The team tested their approach on two different quantum computers, one made by IonQ, which is headquartered in Maryland, and the other by D-Wave. Each company’s quantum devices use quantum bits, or qubits, slightly differently to process information. The research team was able to solve scheduling problems with up to 12 trains on D-Wave’s system, which contains thousands of qubits, and only two trains on IonQ’s 25-qubit system. 

This proof-of-principle work demonstrates that quantum computers can tackle concrete problems, though they’re not yet faster or cheaper than classical supercomputers for large networks—the experiments cost about $65,000. 

“What we’ve shown is that with the currently available hardware, you can already solve practical problems,” Deffner, senior author on the new paper, says. The study highlights the need for larger, less noisy quantum systems to handle bigger networks.

Merging expertise, expanding possibilities

The potential impact is significant; rapid rescheduling could prevent network-wide disruptions. 

“If you have an issue on a train network, everything has to stop until you reschedule, at least in that region—and the longer it takes you to come up with a new schedule, the more disruptive the original problem becomes,” Doucet noted, as a train coasted noisily into the platform. 

Robertson, a Ph.D. candidate in computer science, added, “Within the next few generations of quantum technology, the problems we could address will get larger, approaching problems that are intractable on current hardware.” 

Robertson’s computer science background complements the team’s physics expertise.

“Someone else might be able to help me with physics intuition, and then I can help them by suggesting an algorithm we could use to test their idea, or by applying some computational intuition that we could use in designing our quantum solution.”

“Quantum information science is truly interdisciplinary,” adds Deffner, who is also affiliated with the UMBC computer science and electrical engineering department and has master’s level math training.

Beyond trains 

This interdisciplinary, quantum-based approach could eventually optimize logistics, financial portfolios, or drug discovery—fields with complex, random variables. The study, funded through Deffner’s fellowship at the National Quantum Laboratory, involved coding, theoretical modeling, and experiments on real quantum devices—a departure for Deffner’s typically theory-focused research group. 

Working on the Baltimore system was a fun challenge, Deffner says, because the LightRail Link transitions from operating as a train unaffected by traffic outside the city to a tram navigating city streets and stopping at traffic lights inside Baltimore. “Because of its unusual characteristics, it was just a unique problem. And of course, it’s cool to work on a local system,” Deffner says.

By uniting diverse expertise, UMBC’s team is turning quantum noise into a strength, paving the way for efficient solutions to real-world problems.