QIA initiatives successfully implemented

The QIA Internship Program targeting EU countries without a QIA partner has successfully granted three internship opportunities to students and young researchers in Poland and Slovenia. University of Innsbruck hosted one intern in October and will host another in February, while TU Delft welcomed one in October.

Another QIA initiative, Quantum Internet Application Challenge, has successfully concluded in November. The grand winner is a researcher from Italy who developed qperf, a tool for quantum link performance measurement.

QIA Hackathon was also launched in December, with pan-European hackathons happening simultaneously in at least four (4) European cities on 15-16 February 2024. These nodes will be located in Delft, Dresden, Paris and Poznań.

Two new QIA partners: PQI and RWTH Aachen

Portuguese Quantum Institute (PQI) and RWTH Aachen joined QIA in the second half of 2023. PQI, which was also part of the first phase of QIA, brings its expertise on distributed quantum technologies in the Use Case Team. RWTH, on the other hand, offers its expertise in systems engineering and integration of quantum systems in the QIA Technology Forum.

QIA members met in Paris and Delft

The QIA Spring Meeting in Paris welcomed over 150 members from more than 30 partners across Europe. The QIA Autumn Meeting in Delft, on the other hand, received more than 70 principal investigators, team leads, and specially invited members.

Both meetings served as a nice opportunity for members to not just share updates on the technical work of QIA, but also to meet and mingle with other members.

Six (6) QIA-supported scientific publications

QIA members published six scientific publications documenting findings of QIA research activities by teams in QuTech, University of Innsbruck, ICFO and University of Parma. These are publications with support from QIA.

You can find all QIA-supported scientific publications here.

QIA organised high impact events

We hosted a QIA day at the Inside Quantum Technology 2023 The Hague in March, where QIA members giving keynote speeches and presentations as well as sitting and moderating in panel discussions. This three-day event was attended by over 250 participants from all over the world.

More recently, QIA also organised a quantum lunch event at the European Parliament. In this event, members of the European Parliament, officials from the European Commission, and representatives from member states, academe and industry gathered to chart Europe’s strategies to advance the region’s technological leadership in quantum internet.

Architecture Team’s Modelling and Simulation Team released two software packages

The team at TU Delft released an updated and improved version of SquidASM, QIA’s Application Simulator, and our simulation engineer Michał van Hooft has run several tutorials to get interested QIA-people up to speed! SquidASM has also received a shiny new logo!

Our team members at SURF have released YOTSE – Your Optimization Tool for Scientific Experiments. YOTSE is a flexible workflow manager that is used by the Simulation Team to efficiently run parameter optimizations with the blueprint simulation – but it can be used with other software too!

Startups in QIA achieved remarkable milestones

We witnessed the following milestones unravelling in 2023:

• Welinq has raised €5 million in pre-seed financing and revealed new visual identity early this year. They were also selected as Finalist of Hello Tomorrow Global Challenge a renowned international startup competition organised by Hello Tomorrow since 2014.
• Sparrow Quantum secured a record seed funding of 31 million DKK (€4.1m), largest investment to-date in a Danish quantum technology company. They also joined the Danish Quantum Communication Infrastructure (QCI.DK) this year.
• VeriQloud completed a €1.9-million funding round, allowing them to accelerate the development of their hardware and software applications.
• Qblox marked its five-year anniversary in September with a new headquarter in Delft.
• Q*Bird recently shared its new logo and website in January.

New website launched; LinkedIn campaigns rolled out

In July, we launched our new website where visitors can have a better overview of who we are (About us), what we do (Our work) and the valuable resources for our community (Resources and Open platforms). Since the launch, over 8,000 unique users visited our website and registered over 25,000 page views.

Our LinkedIn company page, created on 15 December 2022, has featured many campaigns this year. These include Meet a QIA partner, #showyourlab and Quantum Eavesdropper. They generated thousands of impressions and engagements, and attracted followers which now reached ~2,400 as of writing.