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