IEEE QSW Symposium 2022

The 2022 IEEE Quantum Software Symposium is organized as an integral part of the 2022 IEEE International Conference on Quantum Software.

The broad domain of Quantum Software (QSW) covers topics such as (hybrid) quantum software engineering, quantum software development, quantum in the cloud, quantum applications, quantum software analysis & evolution, and more. Our goal is to provide a platform for researchers and practitioners from different areas of quantum computing and (classical) software and service engineering to strengthen the quantum software community. This symposium will feature dedicated sessions under the umbrella of the QSW conference.

Keynote (QSW-SYM1): The Quantum Software Stack as a Lens
Monday July 11, 17:00-18:00
Room: Theater Room
Session Chair: Shaukat Ali, Simula Research Laboratory


César A. Rodríguez Rosario, Chief Scientific Officer, Strangeworks

Dr. César A. Rodríguez Rosario is the Chief Scientific Officer of Strangeworks, a startup that makes the power of quantum computing easily accessible to all developers. Prior to Strangeworks, he worked at Harvard University and Max Planck Institute as a Theoretical Physicist with a focus on Quantum Computing. He has a Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Texas in Austin, and a B.S. in Computer Engineering. His 20 years of experience in quantum computation makes the puertorican natural dream of quantum technologies changing the world.

Invited Talk 1 (QSW-SYM2): Recent and Future Developments in Quantum Computing on Quantum Inspire, Europe’s Cloud Quantum Computing System
Tuesday July 12, 09:00-09:35
Room: Theater Room
Session Chair: Sebastian Feld, Delft University of Technology

Richard Versluis, Principal Systems Engineer, TNO


Richard Versluis (Rotterdam, 1971) is principal systems engineer at TNO and engineering lead of the quantum computing division at QuTech, the cooperation between the University of Delft and TNO. The mission of the quantum computing division is to build scalable prototypes of a quantum computer.

Richard is system architect of Quantum Inspire, Europe’s first public online quantum computing platform. Quantum Inspire include a 5 qubit processor named Starmon-5, and provides the world’s first public access to a spin qubit based processor named Spin-2. With this, it is also a unique platform giving direct access to two different qubit technologies. In a joint cooperation with Surf, Quantum Inspire hosts a 34-qubit QX quantum simulator on the LISA HPC platform. Recently, the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs and Climate Policy initiated a €615 million program to power the advancement of quantum technology. One of the Catalyst programs focuses on further development of Quantum Inspire to add more and better backends and to enable hybrid and NISQ use cases.

Invited Talk 2 (QSW-SYM2): Enabling Quantum-classical Computation on Multiple Time Scales
Tuesday July 12, 09:40-10:15
Room: Theater Room
Session Chair: Sebastian Feld, Delft University of Technology

Blake Johnson, IBM is a Distinguished Research Staff Member and Quantum Platform Lead at IBM. His team is responsible for the hardware and software components involved in execution of a quantum program, including converting the program into the signals that actuate operations on quantum processors. Blake has previously worked across many elements of the quantum computing stack, including research into characterization protocols, quantum programming languages, device design, and system architecture. Prior to IBM, Blake was Chief Quantum Engineer at Rigetti and Senior Scientist at Raytheon BBN. He earned his PhD in physics from Yale.

Panel (QSW-SYM3): Quantum Software: Education, Application, and Commercialization
Tuesday July 12, 10:45-12:00
Room: Theater Room
Session Chair: Shaukat Ali, Simula Research Laboratory

Sabrina Maniscalco, University of Helsinki and Algorithmiq. is a Professor of Quantum Information, Computing and Logic at the University of Helsinki. She has been working in the field of Quantum Information Science and Technologies for over two decades. With over 160 scientific publications in Quantum, she is a world-renowned expert in Open Quantum Systems and Complex Quantum Science. She is the Vice Director of the Finnish Centre of Excellence for Quantum Technolgies, the Lead of Education for the Finnish National Quantum Institute (InstituteQ), and CEO and co-founder of Algorithmiq Ltd, a startup focussing on quantum algorithms for Life Sciences. 

She serves in panels and scientific advisory boards of several international institutions, such as the Quantum Technology Initiative at CERN, has coordinated European projects on Quantum Simulation and Computing, is a project reviewer for the European Commission, the US Department of Energy, the Templeton Foundation, and several National Funding Agencies around the World.

Luciano Bello, IBM Quantum, is a Qiskit developer advocate, senior software engineer, and researcher at IBM Research – Zurich. He is leading the Open-Source Software chapter and the Qiskit DevRel team. Luciano has a PhD in language-based security from Chalmers University of Technology (Sweden). In addition to the development of Qiskit, Luciano has contributed to educational material for the community of users and published scientific work in the Quantum Circuit Optimization field. Among his contributions to the software stack in IBM Quantum is the design of several core components of Qiskit, such as the transpiler. Currently, his role is focused on developing and empowering the open-source community in the Qiskit software ecosystem.

Marco Pistoia Ph.D., is Managing Director, Distinguished Engineer, and Head of JPMorgan Chase's Future Lab for Applied Research and Engineering (FLARE), where he leads research in Quantum Computing, Quantum Communication, Cloud Computing, Confidential Computing, Augmented and Virtual Reality (AR/VR), Internet of Things (IoT) and 5G. He joined JPMorgan Chase in January 2020. Formerly, he was a Senior Manager, Distinguished Research Staff Member and Master Inventor at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center in New York, where he managed an international team of researchers responsible for Quantum Computing Algorithms and Applications. He is the inventor of over 250 patents, granted by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, and over 300 patent-pending applications. Over 40 of his patents are in the area of Quantum Computing. Read more at https://www.jpmorgan.com/technology/flare.

Tatjana Wilk, Munich Center for Quantum Science and Technology (MCQST), is the General Manager of MCQST, which is a Cluster of Excellence funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). Tatjana has more than 15 years of research experience in quantum hardware development. She received her PhD from the Technical University of Munich and the Max-Planck-Institute of Quantum Optics (MPQ), worked as a postdoc at Institut d’Optique in Palaiseau, and has spent several years as a senior researcher at MPQ. Tatjana is managing MCQST since its start in 2019 and contributes advancing Munich into an international hub for quantum technologies. In the newly founded Munich Quantum Valley she is one of the coordinators for outreach and the educational programs reaching from bringing quantum technologies to schools over fellowship programs for students, application oriented internships and PhD fellowships to further education for professionals.

Thomas Rappold,, Divizend is a FinTech entrepreneur, investor and book author and an excellent connoisseur of the technology scene. As CEO of Divizend.com GmbH, he and his team have developed the leading platform for the refund of foreign withholding tax.

Thomas Rappold is considered the inventor of "value investing" in technology stocks and has transferred the valuation concepts of the most successful value investors Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger (Berkshire Hathaway) to the tech sector.

Through his deep expertise in technology stocks, he has developed world-leading technology finance indices. This includes the world's first Quantum Computing Technology Index. It is the first financial product for private and professional investors to profit from the mega topic of Quantum Computing. Investors have invested several 100 million dollars in the financial indices developed by Thomas Rappold.

As a Silicon Valley Insider, Thomas Rappold wrote bestsellers such as "Silicon Valley Investing" and the world's first biography about the well-known Silicon Valley entrepreneur and investor "Peter Thiel".

Thomas Rappold is also a Silicon Valley columnist for the renowned weekly stock market magazine Börse Online and is also a popular TV expert on n-tv and WELT, in online media such as Wallstreet-Online, Focus Online and with Markus Koch. Germany's leading stock market portal Wallstreet Online recently also called him the "platform pope".

Dominic Marchand, Head of Research and Partnerships at 1QBit, studied computer engineering and physics at the University of British Columbia. His current research melds these two fields in a variety of ways. His postdoctorate work is concentrated in computational condensed matter physics with an emphasis on quantum Monte Carlo methods. Dominic sees quantum computing as an exciting new frontier of both software engineering and applied physics.

Dominic is a technology enthusiast with a love for gadgets, electronic or otherwise, and an avid rock climber. He is also suspected of being responsible for a disproportionate fraction of the espresso consumption at 1QBit, but will eagerly claim he could stop if he wanted.

Invited Talk 3 (QSW-SYM4): HPC+QC, NordIQuEst and the Future of Quantum Computing
Tuesday July 12, 12:00-12:30
Room: Theater Room
Session Chair: Sebastian Feld, Delft University of Technology


Göran Wendin, Senior Adviser, Wallenberg Center for Quantum Technology (WACQT), Chalmers University of Technology

Göran Wendin is a professor of theoretical physics at the Department of Microtechnology and Nanoscience at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden. Since 2000 he has coordinated five major EU projects on quantum computing with superconducting devices, as well as two EU projects on molecular electronics. In the EU quantum flagship he led the Software and Algorithms work package of OpenSuperQ (2018-2022), and is a co-author of the roadmap governing the OpenSuperQPlus FPA during 2023-2027.

Göran Wendin is co-founder of WACQT (2018-2029) with the mission to build a Swedish superconducting quantum computer, and a co-founder of NordIQuEst (2022-2025) with the mission to build a cloud-based Nordic HPC+QC ecosystem for hybrid quantum computing. He is a member of the advisory board the Quantum Technology Initiative at CERN, and a member (observer) of the Infrastructure Advisory Group (INFRAG) of the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking.

Invited Talk 4 (QSW-SYM4): Quantum Computing: A Scalable, Systems Approach
Tuesday July 12, 12:30-13:00
Room: Theater Room
Session Chair: Sebastian Feld, Delft University of Technology



Anne Matsuura, Director of Quantum Applications & Architecture, Intel Labs

Dr. Anne Matsuura is the Director of Quantum Applications & Architecture at Intel Labs. Previously, she held positions as the Chief Scientist of the Optical Society (OSA) and the Chief Executive of the European Theoretical Spectroscopy Facility (ETSF). She has been a strategic investor in technology start-ups at In-Q-Tel and a funder of basic science at the Air Force Office of Scientific Research. Anne was the recipient of a Fulbright Scholarship to Japan and is an elected fellow of the OSA. She also is a member of the Board of Directors of Science Counts, a non-profit with the mission of enhancing the public’s perception of science. Anne received her Ph.D. in physics from Stanford University.

QSW Symposium Chairs

Shaukat Ali, Simula Research Laboratory is a Chief Research Scientist, Head of Department, and Research Professor. His research focuses on devising novel methods for Verification and Validation of classical and quantum software systems in many domains. He has been involved in several basic research, research-based innovation, and innovation projects in the capacity of PI/Co-PI related to testing , search-based software engineering, model-based system engineering, and quantum software engineering.

Sebastian Feld, Delft University of Technology is an Assistant Professor in the Quantum & Computer Engineering department, where he and his group are working on Quantum Machine Learning. The overall goal is to investigate how quantum technology might help creating near-term quantum applications, but also how machine learning techniques may assist with developing scalable quantum devices. Before, he was head of Quantum Applications and Research Laboratory (QAR-Lab) at LMU Munich. His main focus as a postdoctoral researcher was on optimization problems and the application of quantum-assisted artificial intelligence. He earned his doctorate from LMU Munich working on time series analysis.

Jessie Yu, IBM is a senior software developer and prolific inventor. Prior to working on quantum computing, Jessie’s career was mainly in the area of IBM mainframe kernel development and analytics software. Her experience in IBM Quantum began in 2018 where she first worked on systems and infrastructure support and later took over as maintainer for qiskit-ibmq-provider, a framework that provides access to IBM Quantum devices and services. She is now the product owner of the backend system software part of the stack. Throughout her career she has presented at various conferences, workshops, and customer engagements.