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Saudi Researchers Use Quantum Computing To Design More Efficient Airplanes

To build its quantum expertise, KAUST has partnered with Zapata Computing, a quantum software company based in Boston, Massachusetts.

Published

5 years ago

June 18, 2021

Joanna Melki

saudi researchers use quantum computing to design more efficient airplanes

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It’s estimated that air travel produces roughly two percent of all greenhouse gas emissions. That alone is a good enough reason to explore innovative designs and create more efficient airplanes, but there’s also the fact that airlines operate on very slim margins, so every bit of fuel they manage to save can go a long way in helping them make more profit.

While computers have been helping engineers and designers optimize the aerodynamic properties of airplanes for decades, researchers at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) are the first to explore the absolute cutting edge of what is currently possible in science and engineering by using quantum computing.

Unlike regular computers, which can, at the most fundamental level, represent only two states using transistors (0 = off, 1 = on), quantum computers can be in a 1 or 0 quantum state, or in a superposition of the 1 and 0 state, which essentially means that they can be on and off at the same time. This allows them to represent all possible system states simultaneously, massively speeding up certain specialized computations.

To build its quantum expertise, KAUST has partnered with Zapata Computing, a quantum software company based in Boston, Massachusetts. Zapata will provide its Orquestra toolset, which promises to greatly simplify the process of conducting research in quantum computing.

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“Quantum computing is still very novel, but it’s going to be a truly disruptive technology that will provide enormous cross-industry opportunities,” said Matteo Parsani, Assistant Professor of Applied Mathematics and Computational Science at KAUST. “Building a knowledge base of quantum expertise at KAUST in the interdisciplinary field of computational fluid dynamics can only be a good thing both for the university and for the Kingdom.”

The potential of quantum computing to accelerate progress the same way traditional computers have is truly immense, but the technology is still in its infancy, and it may take researchers some time to produce useful results. Hopefully, the team at KAUST will be able to design more efficient airplanes taking us further in a cleaner fashion.

Related Topics:Aviation Quantum Computing Saudi Arabia

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ESET Bets On Specialized Security AI At 0.5% The Training Cost

ESET says NeoCortex can estimate an attacker’s next move, with a kill switch and human oversight built in to keep it from going rogue.

Published

5 days ago

November 4, 2026

Dana Saadeh

eset bets on specialized security ai at 0.5% the training cost

A sign-in anomaly, a suspicious process launch and an unusual connection may look harmless alone. Together, they can describe an intrusion that is hard for security to teams to piece together.

To solve that problem, ESET announced ESET NeoCortex on November 4, 2026: a specialized foundational AI model for cybersecurity. It powers ESET LiveCortex, available within the ESET PROTECT Platform, which connects fragmented security signals and turns them into actionable incidents.

Filtering is the main selling point, with LiveCortex processing billions of raw telemetry events daily, and just 0.00111% of them contributing to incidents presented to customers. The aim is less alert fatigue and more analyst time spent on threats that matter.

NeoCortex is built on world-model architecture, learning how digital environments behave and how events relate. ESET says that lets it reconstruct missing incident context, recognize similar past cases and estimate an attacker’s likely next step – what the company calls “minus-one-day defense,” a chance to intervene before the next stage unfolds. ESET points to Black October, the week leading up to October 25, 2026, when critical security issues affecting PHP, Linux, GitLab and other key systems demanded rapid, prioritized responses, as the kind of moment where that context matters.

ESET’s internal research also suggests a specialized model like NeoCortex can be trained at up to 200 times lower cost than a large general reasoning model, while delivering more accurate, defense-focused results. The company credits optimized training, a focus on cybersecurity vocabulary, lower computing requirements and privately owned hardware.

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“AI is accelerating both cyberattacks and cyberdefenses. With ESET NeoCortex, we are applying our AI investment to develop specialized foundational cybersecurity intelligence that remains under our control and strengthens, rather than replaces, human expertise,” said Juraj Malcho, Chief Technology Officer at ESET.

As part of the design, NeoCortex forms part of a layered architecture combining specialized models, deterministic controls, correlation logic, validation, auditability and expert human oversight. Safeguards include restricted sandboxes, read-only tools, continuous monitoring, defined usage and token limits, a kill switch and human oversight of critical response decisions. The model is also developed and self-hosted on ESET’s own infrastructure, which the company says reduces exposure to shifts among third-party AI providers, including commercial and geopolitical ones.