On 15th and 16th of October 2024 principal investigators, team leads and members from QIA partners all over Europe gathered at Royal Institute of Engineers (KIVI) in The Hague, the Netherlands, for the QIA Autumn Meeting 2024.

On Day 1, QIA Director Stephanie Wehner welcomed all members and provided an overview of the event. This was followed by a Ceremony to reward teams who distinguished themselves for the most innovative project and the best paper. Mafalda Jotta Garcia and Niels Bultink happily received the Innovation Award for Qblox, while Gerhard Rempe emotionally accepted the Best Paper Award for the paper “A quantum-network register assembled with optical tweezers in an optical cavity” written together with Lukas Hartung, Matthias Seubert, Stephan Welte and Emanuele Distante. Second places for both the awards were given to Welinq and the paper “Design and demonstration of an operating system for executing applications on quantum network nodes” by C. D. Donne et al.

The ceremony was followed by individual presentations from team leads on the progress of the systems engineering track of QIA’s major work streams (metropolitan, long-distance, stack and integration, architecture, and use cases). The plenary session concluded with dedicated Innovation Team workshops on noteworthy topics on the relationship of scientific publication and patents. The special invited guest speaker Pere Arque Castells from the European Patent Office gave insights in the importance of patents, unitary patent and provided a clear guidance to the audience “Do both: Publish and Patent in the right order”. The rest of the time was then dedicated to different technical work sessions on specific systems and subsystems of QIA prototype network and for charting the next steps.

About QIA

QIA is a consortium of now 41 world-leading institutions working together to build a global Quantum Internet made in Europe. Our main goals are: (1) to build the first full-stack prototype entanglement-based network and (2) to drive an innovative European Quantum Internet ecosystem capable of scaling all sub-systems to world-leading European technology.

QIA organises two meetings annually: a spring gathering with all members and an autumn meeting for principal investigators, team leads, and specially invited members. The next spring meeting is scheduled for May 2024 in Innsbruck, Austria.