Stefan Wörner, IBM Research - Zurich
Stefan Wörner is a Principal Research Staff Member at IBM Research in Zurich and leads Quantum Applications Research & Software Development at IBM Quantum. He received a Master of Science in Applied Mathematics from ETH Zurich in 2010, and a Doctor of Sciences in Operations Management from ETH Zurich in 2013 for his thesis on Convex Optimization in Supply Chain Management. The focus of his research is the development and analysis of quantum algorithms for optimization and machine learning as well as their practical applications, e.g., in finance or supply chain management.

Valeria Bartsch, Fraunhofer ITWM
Dr. Valeria Bartsch is a Team Lead at the Competence Center for High Performance Computing at Fraunhofer ITWM (institute of industrial mathematics) at Kaiserslautern, Germany. She holds a Ph.D. in Physics obtained at the University of Karlsruhe in 2003 and has worked on hardware and computing techniques for particle physics until 2013. She has a long-standing experience working in international scientific collaborations. Between 2003 and 2013 she has been holding positions at the University of Oxford, UK; Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, Chicago, USA; University College London, UK and the University of Sussex, UK. Since 2013 she is working at Fraunhofer ITWM. Since 2020 she has started to work on application development for quantum computers in the scope of the Competence Center of Rhineland-Palatine which is located at Fraunhofer ITWM.

Alberto Di Meglio, CERN
Alberto Di Meglio is the Head of CERN openlab in the IT Department at CERN and Coordinator of the CERN Quantum Technology Initiative. Alberto is an Aerospace Engineer (MEng) and Electronic Engineer (PhD) by education and has extensive experience in the design, development and deployment of distributed computing and data infrastructures and software services for scientific applications. He joined CERN in 1998 as Data Centre Systems Engineer In 2004, he took part in the early stages of development of the High-Energy Physics computing Grid. From 2010 to 2013 Alberto was Project Director of the European Middleware Initiative (EMI), a project responsible to develop and maintain most of the software services powering the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid. Since 2013, Alberto leads CERN openlab, a long-term initiative to organise public-private collaborative R&D projects between CERN, academia and industry in ICT, computer and Data science, covering many aspects of today’s technology, from heterogenous architecture and distributed computing to AI and quantum technologies.

Dimitar Trenev, ExxonMobil
Dimitar Trenev is a program lead at ExxonMobil’s Corporate Strategic Research division. He leads a group of scientists who are developing novel algorithms and workflows for emerging computing platforms, targeting challenging problems in the energy industry. Dimitar is a mathematician by training with strong interests in scientific computing and he is also the technical lead for the quantum computing research at ExxonMobil.

William Zeng, Goldman Sachs
Dr. William Zeng leads the quantum computing research group at Goldman Sachs and is founder and President of the Unitary Fund, a non-profit dedicated to developing quantum tech to benefit the most people. He received his PhD in quantum algorithms from Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar and a BSc. in Physics from Yale University.

Quantum computing technologies are emerging. However, as a consequence, there is an increase in the complexity of software and its development, since the applications will be implemented using a mix of quantum and classical resources. Orthogonal to this progress, Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) is applied to reduce complexity and ease the development of software systems. MDE proposes to apply modeling techniques such as General Purpose Modeling Languages as well as Domain-Specific Modeling Languages, and generative techniques such as model transformation and code generation. In this talk, we argue for a dedicated research line which deals with the exploration of how MDE may be applied to quantum computing. For this purpose, we first outline the main principles behind MDE. Thereafter, we describe a particular case study, namely the problem of k-community detection and show how it can be solved with NISQ-devices utilizing hybrid quantum-classical approaches. Subsequently, this problem serves as a demonstration case for applying methods and techniques from MDE to develop quantum software as well as to derive research challenges. Although still in an early stage, we expect the combination of MDE with quantum computing to allow for efficiency increase in the development of quantum software and to open the door for domain experts to utilize this emerging technology.

Antonio Garmendia is a postdoctoral researcher at the WIN-SE department at the Johannes Kepler University Linz (JKU Linz). He received his Ph.D. in Computer and Telecommunication Engineering from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (UAM). As a Ph.D. student, he made a research visit to the Philipps-University Marburg (Germany). He was a member of the “Modelling and Software Engineering” research group (http://www.miso.es/) at UAM. His research interests are in scalability in Model-Driven Engineering (MDE), the construction of graphical/textual environments and the application of MDE to Quantum Computing. He has participated in the MONDO EU project on scalability in MDE.

Felix Günther Gemeinhardt
joined in 2020 as a predoc researcher the Christian Doppler Laboratory on Model-Integrated Smart Production (CDL-MINT) at the Johannes Kepler University Linz (JKU Linz). Besides this, Felix is also a master student in Physics at JKU Linz. He holds a Master Degree in Business Management and he received a BSc in Physics. His research interests are in the application of Model-Driven Engineering techniques to Quantum Computing.

Ismael Faro, IBM Research
Ismael Faro is distinguished engineer and technical lead in the IBM quantum software and cloud team, being part of IBM Research. He leads the developer cloud team to create the first public Quantum Cloud platform, IBM quantum experience (2016), after that was one of the first contributors in the open-source quantum computing framework Qiskit (2017). Ismael continues lead the developer team and his focus is how integrate quantum and conventional computation. He currently is working in Qiskit Runtime release in 2021 where combine quantum and cloud computation.

Ismael has collaborated from a while with developer and entrepreneurs’ communities and open-source projects. He co-founded several startups and advise financial companies, startups, and European governments.

Shai Machnes, Qruise
Dr. Shai Machnes is the CEO of Qruise - a company providing software to accelerate the development of quantum technology devices using advanced control, optimization and machine-learning algorithms. After 15 years in the software industry, Shai turned to physics, completing his graduate studies at Tel-Aviv university. Shai pursued his research at Ulm University and the Weizmann institute, and became a group leader at the Institute for Quantum Computing Analytics at Forschungszentrum Jülich, Germany. Together with Prof. Tommaso Calarco, Prof. Simone Montangero and Prof. Frank Wilhelm-Mauch, Qruise was created to make the results of over 50 years of quantum control research available to academic and commercial labs everywhere.

Albert Frisch, AQT
Albert Frisch is a Senior Research Engineer at AQT with main focus software development and architecture for ion-trapped quantum computers across different layers of the stack, from cloud services to hardware control. His largest interests are in orchestrating automated calibration tasks, system health checks, and parameter monitoring. Albert studied quantum optics and atomic physics and received a Ph.D. degree from the University of Innsbruck in Ultracold Quantum Gases of Erbium in 2014. After a post-doc position at the Institute of Quantum Optics and Quantum Information he joined IBM Research and Development in Germany where he started as a circuit design engineering professional working on IBM's high-performance processor series P and Z. Since 2017 he was additionally engaged in the hardware and software development within IBM Quantum. In the beginning of 2020 he joined AQT where his main tasks range from software development, system control and management, to performance benchmarking, and testing of quantum computing systems.

Yudong Cao, Zapata Computing
Dr. Yudong Cao is the CTO of Zapata Computing. He obtained his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Purdue University. In 2016, he joined the Aspuru-Guzik group at Harvard University to develop algorithms for noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices. Yudong is now one of the most prolific developers of NISQ quantum computing algorithms in the world, having developed quantum algorithms across the fields of machine learning, chemistry, finance, optimization, differential equations, and quantum error correction. This impressive array of work, together with his visionary effort in developing Zapata's software platform, has served as the foundation for the applications and solutions that Zapata Computing offers their enterprise clients.

Tennin Yan, QunaSys