Keynote Speakers

Prof. Sauro Succi
Center for Nano and Neuro Science at la Sapienza, Roma, Italian Institute of Technology

Simulating classical fluids on quantum computers: challenges and future perspectives

Sauro Succi holds a degree in nuclear engineering from the University of Bologna and a PhD in physics from the Swiss Polytechnic in Lausanne. He currently serves as a Senior Research Executive and Principal Investigator at the Center for Life Nano-Neuro Sciences at la Sapienza of the Italian Institute of Technology and a Research Associate and Visiting Faculty at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences since 2000.

He has been a Research Director at the Institute for Applied Computing of the Italian National Research Council (1995-2018), a senior research staff at the IBM European Center for Scientifc and Engineering Computing (1986-1995) and an Euratom research fellow at the Max-Planck Instituet for Plasmaphysics in Garching (1981-82).

His research activity covers a broad range of topics related to the mathematical and computational modelling of complex systems in uid dynamics and allied disciplines, such as thermonuclear fusion, uid turbulence, soft-bio matter, quantum uids and lately quantum computing for uids as well. He is best known for his contributions to the early inception, development and application of the Lattice Boltzmann method, for which he has received a number of international awards, including the APS Fellowship (1998), the Alexander von Humboldt Award in Physics (2002), the Raman Chair of the Indian Academy of Sciences (2012), the American Physical Society Aneesur Rahman Prize in Computational Physics (2017), the CECAM Berni Alder Prize (2019). He is also the co-recipient of the Aspen Institute Italian award for excellent Italian/US collaborations and he received the 2024 Eugenio Beltrami Prize for outstanding mathematical contributions to engineering. He is a European Research Council awardee (2017,2022,2024), an elected member of Academia Europaea (2015) and a Honorary Professor at the Mechanical Engineering Department of University College London (2022).

He serves/d as an associate editor of over several international scientifc journals and since 2022 is the chief editor of the Complex Physical Systems section of Frontiers in Physics. He also served as a panel member and scientifc adviser to many academies and research institutions/agencies worldwide, including the European Research Council.

Dr. Catherine McGeoch
D-Wave Systems (Retired), Vancouver, Canada

Applications and Use Cases for Quantum Optimization

Dr. McGeoch, recently retired, was a member of the Benchmarking Team at D-Wave Systems for about 10 years. Before joining D-Wave, she was the Beitzel Professor of Technology and Society and chair of the Computer Science Department at Amherst College, having joined the college in 1987. She holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University.

Her research interests focus on development of methods and procedures for empirical evaluation of algorithms and heuristics; and more recently, on
performance analysis of quantum annealing heuristics and platforms.

She co-founded the DIMACs Implementation Challenge series and the SIAM Symposium on Algorithm Engineering and Experiments. She is past Editor-in-Chief of ACM Journal of Experimental Algorithmics, and has served on the ACM Publications Board.

Dr. McGeoch is the author of two books, one on experimental methodology for algorithm analysis, and one on adiabatic quantum computation and quantum annealing. She is author or co-author of scores of papers on a broad range of topics, including experimental algorithmics, quantum annealing, and benchmarking quantum platforms. She is coholder of five patents.

Prof. Tolga Birdal
Department of Computing of Imperial College London

Quantum Enhanced Computer Vision and Machine Learning

Tolga Birdal is a UKRI Future Leaders Fellow and an assistant professor in the Department of Computing of Imperial College London. Previously, he was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Stanford University within the Geometric Computing Group of Prof. Leonidas Guibas.

Tolga has defended his masters and Ph.D. theses at the Computer Vision Group under Chair for Computer Aided Medical Procedures, Technical University of Munich led by Prof. Nassir Navab. He was also a Doktorand at Siemens AG under supervision of Dr. Slobodan Ilic working on “Geometric Methods for 3D Reconstruction from Large Point Clouds”. His current foci of interest involve topological / geometric machine learning and 3D computer vision. More theoretical work is aimed at investigating and interrogating limits in geometric computing and non-Euclidean inference as well as principles of deep learning. Tolga is an AC for major vision conferences such as CVPR, ICCV, ECCV and 3DV and he has several publications at the well-respected venues such as NeurIPS, CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, ICLR, ICML, T-PAMI, IJCV, ICRA, IROS, ICASSP and 3DV. Aside from his academic life, Tolga has co-founded multiple companies including Befunky, a widely used web-based image editing platform.

Prof. Dr. Kristel Michielsen
Director of Jülich Supercomputing Centre, Jülich, Germany

Integrating quantum and high performance computers for practical quantum computing

Prof. Dr. Kristel Michielsen, a computational physicist, received her PhD from the University of Groningen (Netherlands) in 1993 for work on the simulation of strongly correlated electron systems.

She is director of the Jülich Supercomputing Centre at Forschungszentrum Jülich, holds the chair for Quantum Computing and Modular Supercomputing at the University of Cologne, and is the head of the research group Quantum Information Processing, of the division HPC for Quantum Systems and of the quantum computer user facility JUNIQ – Jülich Unified Infrastructure for Quantum computing – at the Jülich Supercomputing Centre. Kristel Michielsen and her research group have ample experience in performing large-scale simulations of quantum computers and annealers and in benchmarking and studying prototype applications for this new compute technology in optimization, simulation, machine learning and quantum AI. With her group and a team of international collaborators, she set the world record in simulating a quantum computer with 48 qubits. In 2019, she participated in a research collaboration that proved Google’s quantum supremacy. With deep expertise in HPC and quantum computing, she has played a pioneering role in bringing quantum computing to the HPC community and integrating both types of computing.