It’s safe to say Marcin Dukalski knows a thing or two about the practical application of quantum technologies.
Experienced in conducting R&D around geophysics for the energy sector, he spent from 2019 to early 2025 exploring use cases for quantum computing for Saudi Arabia based energy giant Aramco.
But with a focus on putting technology to use in practice, he felt like too much conversation in the field of quantum was related to theoretical research. The leap forward into practical applications was left to specific R&D projects that rarely generated much public discussion.
Building a tribe
“I thought I was alone with that problem, until I realised that there are a lot more people like myself, splintered between various end-user communities,” Marcin explains.
“There wasn't really a place where I could interact with other people trying to squeeze out every little bit of performance out of current-day quantum devices, while working on a problem that somebody would actually be willing to pay money for having solved.
“Quantum applications communities in fields such as geophysics, computational mechanics, computer vision etc, still number about 10 researchers each - not enough for a dedicated session, let alone a stand-alone event. There is more activity around chemistry, material science, logistics, or operations research, but that’s only a small fraction of the total computational sciences and engineering field or the high-performance computing market.”
But over time, Marcin began to encounter other people with the same experience. Most notably prof. Matthias Möller from the Delft Institute of Applied Mathematics at TU Delft and Prof. Norbert Hosters, the Chair for Computational Analysis of Technical Systems from RWTH -Aachen University. Together under the banner of the European Community on Computational Methods in Applied Sciences (ECCOMAS) they started creating an event of their own.
“The conference that we all wish we had”
“We figured, let's join forces and create the conference that we all wish we had, but it is too early to reach 100-200 participants with a single end-user community," Marcin says.
"The idea is to see if there is some out-of-the-box way of trying to distribute the computational workload, and organise computation such that current devices can do something practical and scalable, as opposed to what we read in all the academic papers. We were looking for a platform to exchange technical ideas, which isn’t easy at conferences catered towards investors rather than quantum computing practitioners.”
Thus, Applied Quantum Methods in Computational Sciences and Engineering (AQMCSE 2025) was born, with a focus on exchanging ideas between practitioners with different specialisations.
“I think it's an insufficiently appreciated aspect that applied quantum computing is an extremely interdisciplinary effort, where you need to have people who understand how to get the most out of quantum devices, how to best combine them with with classical algorithms, and then solve a problem that actually makes sense to somebody, attempt to benchmark this against the current best practices and see if it fits well with the existing computational workflows.”
To reflect this, the conference’s organising committee includes a mix of representatives of hardware and software vendors, end users, and representatives of quantum and end-user industries as well as academia from around the world.
“These are colleagues from our collaborative networks, in the Netherlands, Germany, the UK, France, US and Japan, many of whom we met through the International Network for Quantum Annealing and the Quantum Practical Application Research Community” he explains.
Marcin says the goal of the conference resonated well with world-leading researchers, meaning it wasn’t difficult to convince them to dedicate their time to the technical committee and to give a keynote address at the event.
Beyond practitioners
Marcin hopes to attract not just practitioners in the application of quantum computing, but governments and funding agencies, so they can see exactly what is being done with the technology, beyond the headlines and press releases:
“I would like them to see what's already possible on quantum devices, and maybe this can help shape policy.”
Meanwhile, he wants quantum computer vendors to be exposed to a broader range of ideas about practical applications.
“I want quantum vendors and people who are working on building hardware to understand what it is that people are actually going to be doing on this hardware, and whether a universal set of gates and a given amount of entanglement and gate fidelities is really that important for end user applications.”
Marcin also thinks the conference could help the quantum industry better match today’s technology with practical use cases, even if that means rethinking the way the industry thinks about the technology itself.
“To further accelerate progress, we should start thinking about these quantum devices less as quantum computers, but more as dedicated accelerators meant for specific computational tasks which are in demand for a broad user-base in the CSE community”.
“We want to invite people to have an end-to-end, holistic discussion on where we are going with this, but also at a sufficiently technical level that both recent joiners and seasoned researchers in the practical quantum computing community can learn from it.”
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The event will take place between 8-10 October 2025 in Aachen. For more information visit www.aqmcse.com.