Daniel Goldsmith and Jack Waller, presented their research at the UKRI National Quantum Computing Centre (NQCC) SparQ Access Showcase 2026, held at the University of Kent from 30 September to 1 October 2026.

Jack presented “Quantum Generative Diffusion Model for Real-World Time Series”, while Daniel presented “Solving Larger Travelling Salesman Problem Networks”.

Their presentations followed the successful completion of two UKRI NQCC SparQ Access-funded projects. The showcase provided an important opportunity to share research outcomes, strengthen engagement with the wider UK quantum community, and raise the visibility of QAI’s research. The presentations generated strong interest and constructive discussion, reflecting the relevance and potential impact of the work.

Congratulations to Daniel and Jack on their successful presentations, and many thanks to the University of Kent team and the NQCC for organising an informative and engaging event.

Dr Xing Liang has been awarded a prestigious Royal Academy of Engineering / Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship for 2026–2027 to develop new quantum AI technologies for sustainable energy harvesting.

Dr Liang is one of eight researchers across the UK to receive the fellowship. 

Her project, Quantum AI-Driven Energy Harvesting from Cavitation Devices, will explore how quantum AI can improve the design of devices that capture energy released by tiny bubbles forming and collapsing in rapidly moving liquids.

We are pleased to share that Jack Waller attended the NQCC Quantum Technologies Summer School 2026, held from 7–17 September 2026, took place from September 7 to 17, 2026, at St Hilda's College, University of Oxford .

Jack particularly enjoyed the lectures, learning more about the hardware side of quantum technologies and gaining useful insights for his current projects. It was also a great opportunity to meet other PhD students working in similar areas.

Many thanks to the QCI3 Hub for organising such an enjoyable and valuable summer school.

We are delighted to share that QAI researcher Daniel Goldsmith served as a judge at the NQCC Hackathon, held at the University of Warwick from 18–20 August 2026.

The hackathon brought together participants to develop creative solutions using quantum technologies, and Daniel contributed his expertise to evaluating the teams’ ideas, technical approaches and innovative applications. 

QAI researchers Jean-Christophe Nebel, Xing Liang and Nour Badr supported Which? journalist Tali Ramsey in an investigation examining the ability of the UK public to identify deepfake videos.  

The study highlights the growing challenges posed by increasingly realistic deepfake technology and reinforces the importance of effective deepfake detection, public awareness and stronger consumer protection measures.

It was inspiring to see strong research presentations, thoughtful discussions, and excellent engagement from our students and academic community. A special congratulations to our two PhD researchers Mr Nour Badr and Mr Jack Waller  who were awarded prizes in the oral presentation category, achieving First Prize and Third Prize. Congratulations to you both on this fantastic achievement! 

Nour recently presented his paper, "FRLD-DF: Frequency Ring-Guided LoRA Adaptation of DINOv2 Vision Transformer for Generalizable Deepfake Detection", at the 2026 International Conference on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition (FG 2026) in Kyoto, Japan.

This work introduces a novel framework that combines parameter-efficient adaptation of DINOv2 with structured frequency-domain modeling for deepfake detection. The proposed approach demonstrates strong generalization capabilities across multiple unseen datasets, achieving state-of-the-art cross-dataset performance while maintaining a low number of trainable parameters. 

Daniel presented his work, “Solving Larger Travelling Salesman Problem Networks with a Penalty-Free Variational Quantum Algorithm,” as a poster at QCTiP 2026. His work explores new approaches to solving complex optimisation problems using variational quantum algorithms, contributing to ongoing research at the intersection of quantum computing and combinatorial optimisation. 

Dr. Xing Liang was honored to serve as a PhD viva committee member for four doctoral defenses in the Doctorate in Physics and Astronomy at the University of Florence. The defenses reflected a high standard of research, and it was a pleasure to contribute to the evaluation process and academic discussions. 

As the year came to a close, our Quantum AI group came together for a final discussion to share ideas and reflections. We looked back on several key milestones from the year and considered how they shaped our collective progress. The session gently reaffirmed the importance of collaboration in moving our work forward. As we enter the new year, we do so with a sense of clarity, steady curiosity, and quiet momentum. 

Nour presented his paper on “FlashF5-MaViT: A Fast Five Frequency Mamba with CDC–FastViT Architecture for Deepfake Detection". This work presents a lightweight and efficient deepfake detection framework that combines multi-frequency spectral analysis with a fast hybrid spatial backbone. Despite having only 4.21M parameters, FlashF5-MaViT outperforms many state-of-the-art models, including those with up to 86M parameters, on challenging cross-dataset benchmarks like Celeb-DF, WildDeepfake, and DFD, while also having 29x faster inference than many baselines. 

The QAI group attended the 2025 National Quantum Technologies Showcase in London, organised by Innovate UK with EPSRC and the UK National Quantum Technologies Programme, to learn about recent developments in quantum science and technology. 

We’re delighted to share that Mr. Daniel Goldsmith spoke on “What is Quantum Computing” at the Year of Quantum event, hosted by Digital Catapult on Wednesday, October 1, 2025. 

The event featured inspiring talks and engaging discussions on the fundamentals of quantum computing, its groundbreaking applications, and the promising future of quantum technologies.

N. E. A. Badr, J. -C. Nebel, D. Greenhill and X. Liang, "WaViT-CDC: Wavelet Vision Transformer With Central Difference Convolutions for Spatial-Frequency Deepfake Detection," in IEEE Open Journal of Signal Processing, vol. 6, pp. 621-630, 2025, doi: 10.1109/OJSP.2025.3571679.  

This research focuses on building more efficient and explainable intrusion detection systems (IDS) for cloud environments where we proposed a lightweight IDS leveraging FastViT, combined with advanced feature selection to significantly improve the detection of minority intrusion attack types such as Web and Infiltration. 

Sponsored by the Turing Grant and hosted by Prof. Filippo Caruso,  Jack undertook a one-month PhD exchange visit with the Quantum Artificial Intelligence (QAI) research group at the University of Florence, Italy, in May 2025. During this visit, he expanded his professional network and established meaningful collaborations with researchers dedicated to advancing the field of quantum machine learning. 

Nikhil Sushil Muneshwar, Xing Liang, and Gordon Hunter, "Football Analysis System using Computer Vision and Machine Learning", In: 12th MathSport International Conference 2025, 4-6 Jun 2025: Luxembourg, Luxembourg

A highly insightful and engaging seminar on Quantum AI was delivered by our academic visitor, Prof. Filippo Caruso, leader of the Quantum AI (Q-AI) research group from the University of Florence, Italy. 

Our researcher Daniel has attended the workshop on QML in Vienna.  It was an amazing session with very interesting lab tours.