Researchers have used quantum physics and machine learning to quickly and accurately understand a mound of data – a technique, they say, could help extract meaning from gargantuan datasets.

Their method works on groundwater monitoring, and they’re trialling it on other fields like traffic management and medical imaging.

“Machine learning and artificial intelligence is a very powerful tool to look at datasets and extract features,” Dr Muhammad Usman, a quantum scientist at CSIRO, tells Cosmos.