The QIA Spring 2025 Meeting, held on May 19–20 at Villa Blanka Eventcenter in Innsbruck, brought together nearly 100 members for two days of technical updates, in-depth collaboration and strategic planning toward the consortium’s work of building a quantum internet prototype network.

Day 1 opened with a welcome from host Ben Lanyon from the University of Innsbruck and QIA highlights from Director Stephanie Wehner. This was followed by the Best Paper and Innovation Ceremony, where a paper published by ICFO (title: Heralded entanglement of on-demand spin-wave solid-state quantum memories for multiplexed quantum network links) was named Best Paper. All QIA partners who submitted innovations were recognised, highlighting the range of innovations emerging from joint research and cross-institutional collaboration within the consortium.

From left Stephan Ritter (Toptica), Stephanie Molin (Thales RT), Anabel Ovide Gonzalez (UPV), Michele Amoretti (University of Parma), Bart van der Vecht (QuTech), Ingmar Te Raa-Derckx (QuTech), Hugues de Riedmatten (ICFO), Christoph Tresp (Toptica), Vatshal Srivastav (Qblox), Isabelle Riou (Welinq), Josef Schupp (AQT), Frederik Hahn (TU Berlin) and Jonah Heiler (LIST)

The rest of Day 1 programme featured technical presentations on metropolitan network, long-distance backbone and stack and integration work packages. These were chaired by Florian Kaiser (LIST), Hugues de Riedmatten (ICFO), and Fokko de Vries (Qblox), respectively.

Technical presentations were followed by work sessions and a poster session highlighting the work of QIA’s young researchers. Poster session is organised to encourage knowledge sharing and exchange among members working in similar or intersecting fields. A social dinner at an Austrian pub followed, offering a relaxed networking environment.

Day 2 opened with the Use Case Session, led by Michele Amoretti (University of Parma), followed by the Architecture and Innovation & Outreach Sessions chaired by Nico Seidler (QuTech) and Stephan Ritter (Toptica), respectively. These sessions emphasized user engagement, network design strategies, and successful transitions from research to commercialisation, featuring insights from Toptica and Welinq.

The day concluded with focused work sessions and a closing plenary. The final highlight was a series of lab tours organised by the University of Innsbruck.

The next QIA meeting will be in October in The Hague.