Quantum computing is making significant strides and stands at the forefront of innovations that could revolutionize how we approach programming. Recently, the field has become more accessible, thanks to cloud-based services that provide on-demand access to quantum hardware, sparking renewed interest among researchers, businesses, and developers alike. In this talk, I will provide a high-level overview of the current state of quantum computing from the perspective of a classical software engineer. Additionally, I’ll share some of the experiments we’re conducting to understand and learn what is available and how the available quantum services can impact on software development.

Elisabetta Di Nitto is Full Professor at Politecnico di Milano. Elisabetta’s expertise lies in the area of software engineering and, in particular, of large-scale, open, service-oriented systems with a special attention to the techniques to make these systems self-adaptable to the changes in the environment and in the performances of its distributed components, and to enable them to identify and incorporate new components at runtime. Recently, she has been focusing on supporting the development, deployment and operation of data-intensive applications and on Cloud Computing and, in particular, on how to design applications that can run on multiple clouds in order to limit vendor lock-in and to increase availability and reliability of such applications. Currently, she is focusing on quantum computing and on how to exploit it to support the development of complex systems. Elisabetta has published more than 150 papers in journals and in the proceedings of the most important conferences in the area of software engineering.