Scientific High Council
Scientific direction for research programs, shared benchmarks and the evaluation of quantum computing applications.
Scientific priorities and reproducible methods
The Council provides scientific direction for Q-Alliance, linking fundamental research with industrial and public-interest applications. Its mandate covers research priorities, methodological rigor and the assessment of proposed projects.
Gate-based computing and quantum annealing address different problem classes. Ising and QUBO models are particularly relevant to optimization with annealing and hybrid solvers; they are not a universal representation of every quantum algorithm.
Strategic quantum programs
Q-Alliance’s agenda identifies 26 programs across eight research and application domains. The published overview presents the following areas of work.
Materials
Quantum simulation, nonlinear dynamics, materials design with QUBO models and strongly correlated systems.
Artificial intelligence
Quantum neural networks, support vector machines, reinforcement learning and generative models.
Finance
Portfolio optimization, Monte Carlo pricing, credit risk, fraud detection and hedging.
Life sciences
Drug discovery, protein-folding optimization and genomics.
Infrastructure
Routing and traffic, HPC scheduling, smart grids, security and sensing.
Governance & insurance
Socio-economic simulation, game theory, risk aggregation, claims and reinsurance optimization.
Formulation, benchmarking and evaluation
The Great Challenge invites academic and industrial teams to formulate real-world NP-hard optimization problems as Ising or quadratic unconstrained binary optimization (QUBO) models for quantum annealing and hybrid solvers.
Evaluation focuses on model clarity, hardware compatibility, scalability, reproducibility and solution quality. Quantum and hybrid approaches must be assessed against appropriate classical baselines.
Scientific High Council — agenda
Chair’s opening and welcome
Ugo Moschella
Institutional address
Alessio Butti
Two technology pillars
Niccolò De Masi and Alan Baratz
Mission, governance and Council mandate
Antonio La Gatta
Research priorities
Scientific Council
Ising/QUBO and the Great Challenge
Problem formulation and research framework
Project process and next steps
Submission, evaluation and action items
Chair’s closing
Summary and acknowledgements
Contribute to the research community
Contact the Secretariat to discuss research programs, a project proposal or the assessment of an applied use case.
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