Washington Quantum Computing Meetup

Title: Dependable Quantum-Classical Systems Engineering: From Foundational Principles to Security-Aware Scheduling
Date: Oct 4 2026 10:00 am - Noon EDT
Event format: Online (Zoom registration form will be posted by Oct 4 2026.)
Abstract: Quantum computing is emerging as a promising accelerator for scientific computing, but realizing its potential will require quantum processing units to operate as integral components of heterogeneous High-Performance Computing (HPC) infrastructures. Such integration introduces challenges that extend well beyond quantum hardware performance. This presentation takes a holistic systems-engineering perspective on dependable quantum-classical integration. We first examine the architectural and operational differences between classical HPC and quantum computing and discuss four key dimensions of their integration: architecture definition, programming and execution models, compilation, and fault management. Particular attention is given to the interactions among these layers and to the need for cross-layer co-design rather than isolated optimization. We then focus on system-level orchestration and introduce SQUIRO, a framework for security-aware quantum-classical scheduling. SQUIRO combines a platform-independent Unified Scheduling Model (USM) with a Scheduler Design Methodology (SDM) and demonstrates their implementation in Kubernetes. The framework treats mandatory security requirements as feasibility constraints while jointly considering resource utilization, energy, cost, and workload-specific quantum backend selection
Speaker:
Dr. Edoardo Giusto is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology at the University of Naples Federico II, Italy, and a co-founder of Helix 42. He is a member of IEEE and ACM. Dr. Giusto earned his M.S. in Computer Engineering in 2017 and his Ph.D. in Computer and Systems Engineering in 2021, both from Politecnico di Torino, Italy. He previously served as a visiting postdoctoral researcher at the Superconducting Quantum Materials and Systems Center at Fermilab in Batavia, IL, USA. This appointment was part of the Next Generation Internet Transatlantic Fellowship Program, funded by the European Commission under Horizon Europe. Dr. Giusto plays an active role in the academic community, serving as a technical committee member for leading conferences such as IEEE Quantum Week (QCE), the Design, Automation, and Test in Europe Conference (DATE), and the Design Automation Conference (DAC). Additionally, he serves as Vice-Chair of the IEEE Consumer Technology Society’s Quantum in Consumer Technology initiative. His research focuses on the integration of quantum computing (QC) into high-performance computing (HPC) infrastructures within the emerging quantum-HPC (QHPC) computing paradigm. In particular, he investigates the dependability of hybrid quantum-HPC systems, with an emphasis on the reproducibility of computational results, resilience to hardware and software failures, and security and privacy of code and data.

Title: High-Rate and Computationally-Efficient Seedless Extractors for Device-Independent Quantum Cryptography
Date: Oct 12 2026 Monday (US holiday) 10:00 am - Noon EDT
Summary: Device-independent (DI) quantum cryptography provides secure cryptography with minimal trust in, or characterisation of, the used quantum devices. An essential component of DI protocols is the use of randomness extractors for privacy amplification, but these typically require an initial seed of randomness that introduces a potential vulnerability. To solve this problem, the security of seedless extractors was proven in Quantum 9, 1654 (2025). The core idea was to use the Bell violation of the raw data, rather than its min-entropy, as the extractor promise. However, the large fluctuations in the Bell inequality used required many rounds to precisely estimate the Bell violation, consuming substantial randomness and making the protocol very inefficient. In this work, we present a new proof technique based on a truncation method that allows the user to estimate the protocol parameters with an asymptotically vanishing fraction of rounds and, as a consequence, achieves the optimal rate of one key bit per singlet. Notably, we prove this result using seedless extractors that can be implemented efficiently.
Speaker:
Simone Lin is a PhD student at University College London, supervised by Professor Lluís Masanes. She became interested in quantum information during her master’s degree at the University of Bristol, where she studied tripartite nonlocality. Her research interests span several areas of quantum information theory and cryptography, including the classical simulation of quantum correlations. She is currently developing non-modular security proofs for device-independent quantum cryptographic protocols.

Date and time: Oct 17 2026 Noon - 14:00 EDT ( 18:00 - 20:00 CET)
Title: Humans, Agents, and Shor: Open Autoresearch for Quantum Circuit Optimization
Abstract:
What happens when a hard scientific optimization problem is opened up to a community of humans and AI agents, with every proposed improvement checked automatically? In this talk, Dr. Bartosz Naskrecki will present ECDSA.Fail, an open effort to optimize the reversible secp256k1 point-addition circuit that forms a key bottleneck in Shor’s algorithm for attacking elliptic-curve cryptography.

Using a public evaluator, repository, and leaderboard, participants reduced the benchmark’s qubit–Toffoli product by 86.1%, reaching 1,151 logical qubits and about 1.30 million executed Toffoli gates at the paper’s cutoff. Dr.Naskrecki will highlight several of the circuit ideas behind this progress, including new approaches to reversible modular inversion, transcript compression, register sharing, and specialized arithmetic.
More broadly, Dr. Naskrecki will discuss Open Autoresearch: a model in which human judgment, AI-driven experimentation, and machine-checkable verification combine to produce cumulative, reproducible progress on difficult technical problems.

Speaker: Dr Bartosz Naskręcki is a graduate of Adam Mickiewicz University and specializes in number theory and algebraic geometry. After obtaining his doctorate in 2014, he completed several years of research internships in Bayreuth, Bavaria, Bristol, UK, and at the Dioscuri TDA Center in Warsaw. For over four years, he has been collaborating with Prof. Mariusz Jaskólski in the field of mathematical crystallography, which culminated in a sectional lecture at the European Crystallography Congress ECM 2025. In 2022 and 2023, he received the Crystallography Diamonds award twice, granted by the Crystallography Committee of the Polish Academy of Sciences. He is a co-author of the Leiden Declaration on Artificial Intelligence and Mathematics. In 2025, he co-created the most difficult mathematical test for LLMs, the FrontierMath project. His mathematical problem was included in the most difficult variant of this Tier 4 test, which has so far resisted all the most powerful language models. He is passionate about teaching students at the intersection of computer science and mathematics, teaching courses in areas such as cryptography, mathematical computing in Python, and the use of large language models in mathematical and programming work. He is interested in all aspects of the use of computers in groundbreaking mathematical work.
Dr. Bartosz Naskręcki is also an active popularizer of knowledge, especially regarding the contribution of Polish cryptologists to breaking the Enigma machine code. He received the Polish Mathematical Society's award for young mathematicians for 2013, and in 2010 he was honored in the Józef Marcinkiewicz Competition for the best student work in mathematics. Outside of science, he is a husband and father of two children. In his free time, he is an avid gardener, a fanatic lawn lover, and an avocado grower.

Moderator: Dr. Pawel Gora CEO of Quantum AI Foundation

Title: Hydrodynamical Analogs of Quantum Effects and Other Related Experiments
Date: Nov 1 2026 10:00 am - Noon EST
Event format: Virtual (Zoom registration form will be posted on the day of the event. Please use the same email addresses associated with your Zoom accounts to register. )
Abstract: Dr. Duda would like to discuss walking droplet experiments having wave-particle duality, allowing to recreate various QM-like experiments, like double-slit interference, tunneling, orbit quantization (including double and Zeeman splitting), quantum statistics, violation of Bell-like inequalities, or Elitzur-Vaidman bomb testing. He will also mention analogy between hydrodynamics and EM, Casimir effect, periodic table of droplets, and many other related experiments from top journals.
Speaker: Dr. Jarek Duda is an assistant professor at Jagiellonian University. He holds degrees in computer science (PhD), mathematics (MSc)and physics (PhD). He is mainly focused on physics foundations, information theory, statistical analysis, and is known for introduction of asymmetricnumeral systems.