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Two UNB Students Win Atlantic Quantum Hackathon With a Satellite Collision Tool

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Tushita Govindaraj and Muhammad Umair Akram Butt took first at ACENET's node of the Qollab x IonQ Hackathon 2026. Their Q-Avoid project used quantum amplitude estimation on 365 ESA conjunction warnings and raised correct maneuver calls from 88% to 98% for the same evaluation budget.

Closing card for Q-Avoid: two UNB computer science students take first at ACENET's Atlantic node of the Qollab x IonQ Hackathon 2026 with a satellite collision tool

Over Canada's Thanksgiving weekend, two University of New Brunswick computer science students in Fredericton put a quantum algorithm on a problem that keeps satellite operators awake: how likely are two spacecraft to collide.

Tushita Govindaraj, a final-year Bachelor of Computer Science Honours student, and Muhammad Umair Akram Butt, a Master of Computer Science student, entered as team RAI-Lab. Their project, Q-Avoid, took first place at the ACENET (Atlantic Canada) node of the Qollab x IonQ Hackathon 2026, a global quantum computing challenge.

"The first real proof came when the circuit's probability of measuring the "hit" qubit printed 3.007282e-04, and the classical reference integral printed exactly the same number, 3.007282e-04," Govindaraj said on the ACENET winners page. "Seven digits, identical. Up to then I'd been hoping the encoding was right; after that I knew it was. With the clock running down, I let myself enjoy it for about ten seconds and then went straight on to the benchmarks."

Q-Avoid: collision risk with fewer evaluations

Q-Avoid uses quantum amplitude estimation to estimate the probability that two satellites collide. The team framed the work around Atlantic Canada, where RADARSAT satellites watch the coast for sea ice, oil spills and ship traffic, and tested the method against classical Monte Carlo on 365 real European Space Agency conjunction warnings.

For the same number of model evaluations, the share of correct maneuver decisions rose from 88% to 98%. Theory gives Monte Carlo error a slope of −½ against cost and amplitude estimation a slope of −1. On the ESA data, the fitted slopes came out at −0.49 and −0.99. The notebook notes that the deepest circuit needs about 8,600 two-qubit gates, which requires fault-tolerant hardware. Qollab's write-up says the method can use up to 486 times fewer model evaluations than Monte Carlo for one-in-a-million collision risks.

Almost two hours before the deadline, the team's Qiskit runs and their fast simulation disagreed. The sampler was being reseeded on every call, so 20 runs that should have been independent were the same run 20 times. Next on their list is a hardware noise model, to find how much of the amplification survives on real devices. Team RAI-Lab also entered ChemScope, PhaseCheck and Roost.

Atlantic node of a global build

The online build window ran from 7 p.m. ET on October 9 to 7 p.m. ET on October 11. Projects had to use Qiskit, publish under an MIT license on Qollab, and fit themes labelled Quantum Impact, Quantum Playground and Quantum Unlocked.

At ACENET's node, 45 teams signed up — 27 of them solo — with 34 on the student track and 11 on the professional track. Fifteen of those teams entered 26 projects — the highest project count in North America and the second highest in the world, ACENET said. Globally, Qollab reported 211 teams and 327 projects across 22 local nodes.

ACENET is a research computing consortium of 15 universities and community colleges in Atlantic Canada. Muhammad Muzammil, its Digital Research Consultant for quantum computing, led the node with Michele Fash, Director of Business Development. ACENET thanked three Atlantic Canada judges: Dr. Stijn De Baerdemacker (University of New Brunswick), Dr. Edith Leal-Sanchez (Dalhousie University) and Dr. James LeBlanc (Memorial University). Qollab's node write-up says De Baerdemacker and Leal-Sánchez scored the projects on novelty, technical execution, impact and documentation.

Second place went to Agent Escape Room, a solo build by Salsabil Ben Halima of the Université de Moncton. Third place went to Can you hear entanglement, by Amir Ayati, Ehsan Ghasempouri and Vivek Das of UNB's QuNB group.

Under the published hackathon rules, a local node that enters 10 or more projects awards first place $500 cash and $5,000 in IonQ compute credits, with smaller cash and compute prizes for second and third. ACENET's 26 projects put the node over that threshold. Global winners were announced October 29; Q-Avoid's Atlantic win is the local result.

RAI Lab students

Both winners study computer science in UNB's Faculty of Computer Science and work with Mahtab Sarvmaili in the Responsible AI Research Lab. The faculty said the pair "brought home the gold" at the Atlantic node.

Butt was one of four Atlantic students ACENET placed in Calcul Québec's 2026 summer program in quantum computing, which gave participants access to MonarQ, a 24-qubit superconducting quantum computer. Qollab's node write-up notes he went on from that program to take first at the ACENET hackathon node.

Q-Avoid and the other ACENET entries are open source on Qollab. ACENET later hosted an on-campus showcase where UNB teams presented their projects.

Sources

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