Hi Ryan and Mahout team, I hope you’re doing well. My name is Wei, and I’m very interested in contributing to the “Add ZZFeatureMap Encoding for QDP” project for GSoC 2026. I’ve been working on quantum machine learning (at Scenario X), particularly on kernel-based methods and feature mappings (on financial data), and the ZZFeatureMap is something I’ve encountered frequently in Qiskit. I’m especially interested in how different encodings affect expressivity and model performance, so this project immediately stood out to me. I want to be upfront that while I have experience with quantum ML concepts (e.g. feature maps, kernels, simulation workflows), I have not yet contributed to a production-level system like QDP. That said, I’m very willing to learn quickly and put in the work to understand the codebase and design decisions in Mahout. To get started with this topic, I’ve been exploring the QDP encoding implementations in the Mahout repo (particularly the amplitude, angle, basis, and IQP encodings under the QDP encoding modules), and reviewing how ZZFeatureMap is implemented in Qiskit’s circuit library (documentation). Thank you for your time, and I’d really appreciate any guidance and mentorship you can offer. I’m excited about the possibility of contributing to Mahout and learning from the team. Best regards, |
Wei Chan Leong (Resume).docx
Description: MS-Word 2007 document
