LAO CAI, Vietnam, Nov. 11, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Over 9 days from December 21 to 29, 2026, the British boarding school Ardingly College Vietnam (ACVN), in collaboration with JCI South Saigon, will organize an international winter camp titled "Cultural Bridge Winter Camp" in Lao Cai and Sa Pa. The camp is expected to welcome approximately 50 campers, including domestic and international students aged 12–17 from Japan, South Korea, India, China, and beyond.
JCI (Junior Chamber International) is a global federation of young leaders and entrepreneurs, and JCI South Saigon is one of the first two chapters of JCI Vietnam, operating under the Ho Chi Minh City Young Business Association (YBA). Ms. Thao Trinh, Chairwoman of the Board of Directors of ACVN, currently serves as the President of JCI South Saigon. This marks the third consecutive year that JCI South Saigon has organized the Cultural Bridge Winter Camp.
"At ACVN, we believe that meaningful education extends far beyond the classroom. We are delighted to partner with JCI South Saigon in bringing Cultural Bridge Winter Camp 2026 to life. Together, we hope to create a unique experience where young people from around the world can embrace cultural diversity, build lasting friendships, and develop the confidence, independence, and leadership skills to become truly world-ready," said Ms. Thao Trinh.
Ms. Tran Chieu An, Vice President of JCI South Saigon, shared her opinion: "Cultural Bridge was created on a simple idea: when young people from different countries live, learn and solve real problems together, they build understanding that lasts far beyond the camp. Through this Winter Camp, we want to give the next generation of active citizens a chance to experience Vietnam's diversity first-hand, and to give back to the mountain communities that host them."
Campers will be divided into 6 Houses following the traditional British boarding school House System, with 8 members per House. The Houses are named Rong (Dragon), Long Bien, Kintai, Tower, Golden Gate, and Harbour. Each student will be paired with a companion in a "Bridge Pair," with pair missions updated daily. The Winter Camp itinerary is thoughtfully designed to be rich, creative, and rewarding.
Domestic and international students have 2 registration options to join the Cultural Bridge Winter Camp:
- Full 9-day course: Participation fee of USD 600
- 4-day course: Participation fee of USD 350
The participation fee includes all camp activities, insurance, meals, accommodation, and transportation between Hanoi, Lao Cai, and Sa Pa.
NINE DAYS AWAY FROM ELECTRONIC DEVICES: WHAT WILL STUDENTS DO?
- Connect with peers from all over the world, meeting and interacting in English throughout the 9 days.
- Bring three of their most cherished items from home to share the story of where their world begins.
- Trek through local villages in Sa Pa and listen to villagers tell stories about the terraced rice fields.
- Hand-wrap Tet gifts for highland children and write bilingual greeting cards.
- Cook by the campfire on Christmas Eve, perform with their House, and eagerly await their Secret Santa gifts.
Students will return home with a "World Ready Passport" filled with memories and friendships from across the globe, inspiring them to stay in touch long after this winter ends. Nine days away from screens is traded for an emotional winter of friendship and unforgettable experiences.
The Cultural Bridge Winter Camp is operated by 15 members of JCI South Saigon, including 5 program department heads covering Camp Learning, Leadership & Entrepreneurship, Outdoor & Survival, Health & House Life, and Community & Global Affairs. Supporting staff from ACVN include specialists in child safeguarding, medical coordination, boarding care, and facilities. Every day, campers are accompanied by a dedicated House Mentor, and parents receive daily photo updates of their children.
IF YOU HAD $100 TO START A BUSINESS, WHAT WOULD YOU DO?
Parents have likely heard their children excitedly share an idea: making a craft, opening a stall, or running a project with friends. If given the chance to try, where would they start?
At Cultural Bridge Winter Camp 2026, the $100 Start-Up Challenge gives them that exact opportunity. Using simulated capital, students team up to brainstorm ideas, calculate costs, and prepare a booth for a local market fair.
What should they sell to attract customers? How much spending is reasonable? If the first approach does not work, what will the team change?
Every decision is an opportunity for students to explain their choices, listen to their teammates' perspectives, and find solutions together. An idea gradually takes shape through the tasks they complete side by side.
After the trip, parents can look forward to hearing their children share which idea their team chose, what obstacles they faced, and how they navigated them together.
IS YOUR CHILD READY FOR BOARDING SCHOOL LIFE?
If your family is considering boarding school or studying abroad, you may wonder: away from home, can my child take care of themselves? Will they blend in with new friends, keep up with daily routines, and know how to ask for help when needed?
At Cultural Bridge Winter Camp 2026, your child gets to experience all of this during a 9-day journey at ACVN and Sa Pa.
Students tidy their own rooms, organize their belongings, wake up on time, and live in a House alongside peers from different countries. House Mentors guide them in adapting to this new lifestyle, starting from small daily habits.
Through group activities, students practice speaking up, active listening, and collaborative problem-solving. The World Ready Passport documents their milestones so that by the end of the camp, they can tell their parents what they achieved, what they enjoyed, and where they still need support.
Parents can follow the journey through daily photo updates. Students also have a scheduled call home on the evening of December 25 to share stories about celebrating their first Christmas with new friends.
Nine days may not answer every question about studying away from home, but these experiences will give the whole family a solid foundation to consider the next step.
A WORLD OF FRIENDS AWAITS IN VIETNAM
Your child will connect with Vietnamese and international peers within their House—meeting, interacting, and bonding from day one in English.
They will be paired with an international buddy for all 9 days: bringing three items from home to tell the story of their world, and listening to their buddy's story in return. Both teach and learn from each other.
The 6 Houses are named after 6 world-famous bridges, and each House is a second home where no one is a stranger.
Your child arrives with one buddy and leaves with a whole world of friends.
About Ardingly College Vietnam (ACVN):
- Built and inaugurated in January 2023 with investment from Khoi Nguyen Investment Group (KNI Group), the school currently has around 200 students from Grade 1 to Grade 12, offering bilingual and international programs for both day and boarding students.
- Location: 19/5 Road Intersection (B9-B10 Road), Cam Duong Ward, Lao Cai.
- Campus Area: Nearly 10 hectares, with a total usable floor area of over 50,000 m².
- Total Investment: Nearly 700 billion VND (equivalent to 20 million GBP).
- Curriculum: OxfordAQA international curriculum leading to IGCSE (Grades 9–11) and A-Levels (Grades 12/13).
- Boarding Admissions: Open to boys and girls from Grade 6 (age 11) to Grade 12/13 (age 18).
About JCI:
JCI is the largest global network of young active citizens, leaders, and entrepreneurs aged 18 to 40.
- Mission: To provide leadership development opportunities that empower young people to create positive change, embrace social responsibility, and partner with the United Nations to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
- JCI Vietnam: Founded in 2008 under the patronage of the Ho Chi Minh City Young Business Association (YBA). The organization currently operates multiple chapters across provinces and cities (such as JCI Hanoi, JCI South Saigon, JCI Danang, etc.) with hundreds of projects making positive contributions to the community.
If parents are wondering whether this program is the right fit for their child, message ACVN for detailed consultation on the Cultural Bridge Winter Camp 2026 journey:
- Cultural Bridge Winter Camp 2026
- 21–29 December 2026
- Ardingly College Vietnam, Lao Cai & Sa Pa
- For students aged 12–17
- Registration Deadline: November 22 for international students (to allow sufficient time for visa processing and flight bookings)
- Please scan the QR code on the poster or message our fanpage to register
- enquiry@acvn.edu.vn | +84 (028) 38 95 95 95
- acvn.edu.vn | https://wintercamp.acvn.edu.vn/
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Ardingly College Vietnam and JCI South Saigon to Host Cultural Bridge Winter Camp 2026 for Students from Around the World
New Nighthawk r3 processor will be built to execute 10,000 quantum operations, enabling larger and more complex computations as IBM advances its roadmap toward fault tolerance
Clients and partners including E.ON, Algorithmiq, and Q-CTRL have run more than 34 billion circuits on Nighthawk r2, reporting speedups of up to 19x beyond previous IBM quantum processors
Enhanced IBM Quantum Platform unites quantum with classical computing in one environment
YORKTOWN HEIGHTS, N.Y., Nov. 11, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced IBM Quantum Nighthawk r3, its next-generation processor, will be built to accurately execute 10,000 quantum operations across 520 qubits to tackle larger, more complex problems while maintaining the speed and quality demonstrated by the current generation Nighthawk available today.
In 2027, IBM plans to link two Nighthawk r3 processors into a single system with more than 1,000 qubits.
To be at the frontier of quantum computing, industry-relevant applications demand both computational quality and speed. Speed matters because a quantum computer delivers its answer in samples: each run of a quantum circuit returns one result. Applications increasingly require circuits executing thousands of quantum operations on approximately 100 qubits or more, generating millions to billions of samples. Scale and quality enable increasingly complex computations, but speed determines whether these demanding workloads can be completed in practical timeframes and at a reasonable cost.
"Useful quantum computing hinges on whether results can be delivered with accuracy and speed, both are fundamental," said Jay Gambetta, Director of IBM Research and IBM Fellow. "Nighthawk is already showing us what that looks like today. As we scale this architecture to larger and more powerful quantum computers, the capabilities of quantum computation will reach new levels as we integrate more closely with classical resources and march ahead to fault tolerance."
Nighthawk r2: Delivering Speed for Real-World Workloads
Introduced in September, IBM Quantum Nighthawk r2 delivers up to 100,000 samples per second while supporting accurate computations with more than 7,500 quantum operations on 120 qubits. Its high-speed qubit reset technology dramatically reduces the time between circuit executions, enabling applications to collect the millions or billions of samples needed for complex computations far more efficiently.
Clients and partners including E.ON, Algorithmiq, and Q-CTRL have executed 34 billion circuits on Nighthawk r2 to date, reporting performance improvements of up to 19x while maintaining the quality needed for scientific computation.
The results are already demonstrating value across industries. E.ON reported a 15x speedup on Nighthawk r2 in quantum machine learning for energy grid optimization. IBM used Nighthawk r2 for a 12x speedup of an experiment ran earlier this year with Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which simulated real magnetic materials and produced results consistent with neutron scattering experiments. Both of these speedups were achieved over previous work on IBM Quantum Heron. Quantum Elements and ParityQC are also among the partners reporting significant performance improvements on their own Nighthawk r2 workloads.
The quantum advantage experiments IBM and its partners published in July were first run on IBM Quantum Heron, with circuits and results openly available for independent testing through the community-led Quantum Advantage Tracker. An experiment with Algorithmiq to simulate a heterogeneous quantum material has now been extended to Nighthawk r2, leveraging its speed and connectivity to execute circuits 8 times faster than the original experiment on Heron. At the same time, the new circuits are significantly more challenging for classical computers to simulate, requiring an estimated 240 times more memory to achieve comparable accuracy when using leading classical tensor-network methods.
Nighthawk r3: Scaling to More Than 1,000 Qubits
Building on the performance demonstrated by Nighthawk r2, Nighthawk r3 will extend the same high-speed architecture to larger quantum computers. The new processor is designed to support 10,000 quantum operations on 520 programmable qubits, with 2,034 total physical qubits. It retains r2's square-lattice connectivity and fast operations while introducing 10 chip-to-chip interconnects, called l-couplers, designed to connect processors into larger systems.
IBM has already demonstrated two critical technologies that enable this modular approach. This year, IBM connected Nighthawk r1 processors using four l-couplers, achieving 99.3 percent quantum state transfer fidelity and progressing toward its 99.9 percent target. IBM also connected two cryogenic modules into a single system for the first time, reaching operating temperature in under five days and cooling below 15 millikelvin.
Together, these advances demonstrate critical progress in modularity and provide confidence in IBM's ability to scale Nighthawk to larger quantum computers. In 2027, IBM plans to connect two Nighthawk r3 processors into a single 1,040-qubit system, extending its high-performance architecture to larger and more complex computations.
Quantum Meets Classical on the IBM Quantum Platform
Advancing quantum computers requires continued progress in how they work alongside classical compute to handle errors. Industry-relevant workloads will demand layers of quantum error correction and error mitigation techniques alongside noise learning and post-processing. As quantum workloads scale, they will call for more classical resources, and the challenge now is how to best scale this integration.
To unite these paradigms, IBM Quantum Platform is bringing high-performance (HPC) classical and quantum computing together into a single managed environment. Users can now integrate quantum workflows directly with a range of classical compute – whether from their laptop or a powerful supercomputer – or with the HPC and classical resources that are newly available on the platform.
Users are seeing promising results from these integrations. For example, using the new environment, IBM and RIKEN* scientists executed their original sample-based quantum diagonalization (SQD) workflow roughly 5 times faster while performing 100 times more computations than in the original study. Cleveland Clinic and RIKEN also leveraged the platform to automatically process 608 million samples for modeling biologically relevant structures, 33 times faster than without workflow automation.
Enhanced capabilities will also fuel breakthroughs in quantum error correction. IBM Quantum Platform offers pulse-level capabilities to give researchers precise control over how they can detect, understand, and better correct errors within quantum and classical architectures. This helps them better time operations, reset qubits faster, and extract more information from quantum measurements – giving researchers the visibility to improve error correction at its most fundamental levels.
IBM recently launched a new co-design platform for quantum error correction with Oak Ridge National Laboratory and AMD that physically co-locates Nighthawk with ORNL's Umbra High-Performance Computing (HPC) system, powered by AMD Instinct™ MI355X GPUs and 5th Gen AMD EPYC™ CPUs.
About IBM
IBM is a leading global hybrid cloud and AI, and business services provider, helping clients in more than 175 countries capitalize on insights from their data, streamline business processes, reduce costs and gain the competitive edge in their industries. Thousands of governments and corporate entities in critical infrastructure areas such as financial services, telecommunications and healthcare rely on IBM's hybrid cloud platform and Red Hat OpenShift to affect their digital transformations quickly, efficiently and securely. IBM's breakthrough innovations in AI, quantum computing, industry-specific cloud solutions and business services deliver open and flexible options to our clients. All of this is backed by IBM's legendary commitment to trust, transparency, responsibility, inclusivity and service.
For more information, visit https://research.ibm.com.
Media contacts:
Brittany Forgione
IBM
Brittany.forgione@ibm.com
Erin Angelini
IBM
edlehr@us.ibm.com
* This project is supported by NEDO (New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization), an organization under the jurisdiction of Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI)'s "Research and Development of Quantum-Supercomputers Hybrid Platform for Exploration of Uncharted Computable Capabilities" (Project Leader: Mitsuhisa Sato) as part of the "Project for Research and Development of Enhanced Infrastructures for Post 5G Information and Communications Systems (JPNP20017)."
** This press release is distributed by PR Newswire through automated distribution system, for which the client assumes full responsibility. **
IBM Quantum Nighthawk Demonstrates New Levels of Speed and Quality, with Plans to Scale Beyond 1,000 Qubits in 2027
IBM Quantum Nighthawk Demonstrates New Levels of Speed and Quality, with Plans to Scale Beyond 1,000 Qubits in 2027
IBM Quantum Nighthawk Demonstrates New Levels of Speed and Quality, with Plans to Scale Beyond 1,000 Qubits in 2027
