Quantum computing hardware has continued to progress rapidly since last year’s workshop, moving beyond the noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) era toward early demonstrations of fault tolerance. Late 2024 saw Google unveil its Willow processor, a 105‑qubit superconducting device achieving below-threshold error correction, where logical error rates drop exponentially as more qubits are added, and maintaining logical qubit stability for more durations. These advances, along with mid‑2025 demonstrations of magic-state distillation using neutral-atom arrays, are marking a transition toward practical, scalable fault-tolerant quantum computation (FTQC). Algorithms that rely on such hardware, from Shor’s factoring to large-scale Grover search and quantum machine learning (QML) applications, are becoming increasingly relevant as the first logical circuits are deployed. QML continues to serve as a bridge between the NISQ and FTQC eras, with use cases expanding from molecular design and materials discovery to financial optimization and real-time anomaly detection. 

The rapid approach of fault tolerance also brings sharper focus to quantum security and cryptanalysis. With Shor-capable hardware on the horizon, public key cryptography such as RSA and elliptic curve cryptography faces mounting risk, accelerating global moves toward post-quantum cryptography (PQC). Beyond cryptography, the security of quantum devices themselves is a growing concern, as tomography-based attacks, QML model theft, and denial-of-service vulnerabilities become more relevant with powerful FTQC-capable systems. 

It remains likely that quantum computers will, for the foreseeable future, be accessed remotely, but recent progress in quantum networking—such as entanglement distribution, teleported logic gates across fiber, and modular architectures—suggests a near future where quantum networks link powerful cloud-based quantum servers with smaller-scale client systems. These networks will enable distributed quantum computation and QML, but also amplify challenges of trust, privacy, and security, including the protection of proprietary algorithms and quantum data for clients and defenses against hardware-level and network-based attacks for providers. Software- and hardware-level countermeasures, from blind quantum computation and entanglement distillation to quantum network coding and restrictions on pulse-level access, are becoming essential. This workshop will build on last year’s foundation to discuss these developments, focusing on how emerging fault-tolerant hardware, novel PQCs, cryptanalysis, and quantum networking will define the secure and scalable quantum ecosystem of 2025 and beyond.

Call for Papers

We invite submissions of previously unpublished works broadly in the areas of quantum computing, quantum machine learning, quantum networks, cybersecurity, and their interplay. Topics of interest include but are not limited to the following:

• Quantum Computation 

• Quantum computation 

• Blind quantum computation 

• Distributed quantum computing architectures 

• Quantum algorithms 

• Quantum communication complexity 

• Error correction and mitigation algorithms 

• NISQ and fault-tolerant applications 

• Quantum Machine Learning (QML)

• QML algorithms 

• QML applications 

• Quantum optimization (e.g., QAOA) 

• QML model security 

• Quantum data security

• Quantum Networking & Cybersecurity

• Quantum repeaters, switches, routers 

• Quantum data center architectures 

• Secure quantum networking 

• Quantum network coding 

• Quantum Key Distribution 

• Post-quantum cryptography

Submission Deadline and Guidelines

• Deadline: September 07, 2025 (updated: September 21, 2025).

• Notification of decision: October 02, 2025

• Final version due: October 14, 2025

• Paper submission guidelines same as for the IEEE TPS 2025

Organizing Committee

General Chair: Rob Cunningham, University of Pittsburgh 

Co-Chair: Junyu Liu, University of Pittsburgh

Co-Chair: Kaushik P. Seshadreesan, University of Pittsburgh

Program Committee

Bruno Ricardi de Abreu, Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center

Kishor Bharti, A*STAR Singapore

Kaifeng Bu, Ohio State University

Tianlong Chen, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Alessandro Cilardo, University of Naples Federico II, Italy

Raquel Coelho, University of Pittsburgh

Chaohan Cui, University of Maryland

Shengwang Du, University of Pittsburgh

Swaroop Ghosh, Pennsylvania State University

Edoardo Giusto, University of Naples Federico II, Italy

Yue Joyce Jiang, University of Pittsburgh

Soummya Kar, Carnegie Mellon University

Eneet Kaur, Cisco 

Mohammad Mohammadisiahroudi, University of Maryland, Baltimore County

Jamie Sikora, Virginia Tech

Kate Smith, Northwestern

Xulong Tang, University of Pittsburgh

Tamás Terlaky, Lehigh University

Jun Yang, University of Pittsburgh

Xiu Yang, Lehigh University

Zheshen Zhang, University of Michigan

Youtao Zhang, University of Pittsburgh

Ting Zhu, Ohio State University

Sponsors