3rd International Workshop on Quantum Software Engineering (Q-SE)

Q-SE 2022 will be held virtually via Zoom for participants!

Quantum computers promise to solve unthinkably complex problems that traditional computers could ever solve. The evidence of such quantum supremacy over traditional computers has started to emerge as it can be seen by Google’s quantum computer recently performing a complex computation that would take 10,000 years for the best supercomputer available today. High-level languages to write quantum programs have also started to appear, e.g., Microsoft’s Q# and IBM’s Qiskit. Thus, we believe that this is the right time to build a community for quantum software engineering (QSE) focusing on devising methods, approaches, and processes to develop software for quantum programs efficiently and to ensure their correctness. The Q-SE workshop will provide a platform for researchers and practitioners to discuss the challenges in developing software quantum software in high-level quantum languages, developing novel solutions to build correct methods for developing testing quantum programs, executing quantum software, developing best practices, and creating a research roadmap of quantum software engineering.

The key goals of the workshop are:

1. Provide practical and generalizable insights on how to apply and extend existing approaches to quantum software development or develop entirely new approaches.
2. Devise ways in which industry and academia can collaborate to provide further knowledge on developing quantum software.
3. Provide academia with feedback on which skills and abilities are required in quantum software development and where to concentrate on the education of students.
4. Demonstrate to academia new as well as existing practical challenges in the field of quantum software engineering.
5. Communicate the latest research findings to practitioners and discuss ways to adopt them for industrial products, services, and processes.

The key outcomes of the workshop are:

1. Understanding the current state-of-the-art and state of the practice related to quantum software engineering.
2. Developing a future research roadmap for quantum software engineering.
3. Establishing a new research community in the area of quantum software engineering through developing a special interest group.

Organizing Committee

• Jianjun Zhao, Kyushu University, Fukuoka, Japan
• José Campos, University of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal

Workshop Attendance

If a submission is accepted, at least one author of the paper is required to register for Q-SE 2022 and present the paper. Authors and participants must register through the main conference website: Registration for ICSE 2022 (available soon).

Previous Series

• 2nd International Workshop on Quantum Software Engineering (Q-SE 2021)
• 1st International Workshop on Quantum Software Engineering (Q-SE 2020)

Accepted Papers

Call for Papers

Q-SE welcomes submissions addressing topics across the full spectrum of Quantum Software Engineering, being inclusive of quantitative, qualitative, and mixed-methods research. Topics of interest include but are not limited to:

• Paradigms for developing quantum software
• Quantum software design
• Quantum software testing
• Quantum software verification
• Quantum software coding practices
• Quantum software reuse
• Quantum software experimentations
• Quantum software execution
• Quantum programming languages
• Industrial applications
• Empirical evaluations

Three types of contributions will be considered:

• Regular papers (8 pages, including references): Research or experience reports, research methods, longer challenge papers.
• Position paper (4 pages, including references): Describing a well-argued position in any area of quantum software engineering.
• Fast Abstracts (2 pages, including references): Work in progress, challenges.

Evaluation Criteria

(Following ICSE 2022’s review criteria.)

All submissions submitted electronically through EasyChair will be evaluated by at least three program committee members (aka reviewers). Each reviewer will evaluate each contribution for its:

• Soundness: The extent to which the paper’s contributions and/or innovations address its research questions and are supported by rigorous application of appropriate research methods.

• Significance: The extent to which the paper’s contributions can impact the field of quantum software engineering, and under which assumptions (if any).

• Novelty: The extent to which the contributions are sufficiently original with respect to the state-of-the-art.

• Verifiability and Transparency: The extent to which the paper includes sufficient information to understand how an innovation works; to understand how data (if any) was obtained, analyzed, and interpreted; and how the paper supports independent verification or replication of the paper’s claimed contributions.

• Clarity: The extent to which the paper’s quality of writing meets the high standards of Q-SE and ICSE, including clear descriptions, as well as adequate use of the English language, absence of major ambiguity, clearly readable figures and tables, and adherence to the formatting instructions provided below.

Reviewers will carefully consider all of these criteria during the review process, and authors should take great care in clearly addressing them all. The paper should clearly explain the claimed contributions, and how they are sound, significant, novel, and verifiable, as described above.

Paper Submission

(Following ICSE 2022’s Guidelines on how to prepare your submission.)

ICSE 2022 workshop proceedings will be prepared by IEEE CPS and published by ACM. Thus, workshop papers must follow the ACM formatting instructions. In other words, all authors should use the official “ACM Primary Article Template”, as can be obtained from the ACM Proceedings Template page. LaTeX users should use the sigconf option, as well as the review (to produce line numbers for easy reference by the reviewers) and anonymous (omitting author names) options. To that end, the following LaTeX code can be placed at the start of the LaTeX document:

\documentclass[sigconf,review,anonymous]{acmart}
\acmConference[Q-SE 2022]{The 3rd International Workshop on Quantum Software Engineering}{May ??-??, 2022}{Pittsburgh, PA, USA}

• All submissions must not exceed the maximum allowed number of pages (i.e., 8 pages for regular papers, 4 pages for position papers, and 2 pages for fast abstracts), including main text, figures, tables, appendices, and references. No extra page will be allowed.

• All submissions must be in PDF.

• Submissions must strictly conform to the ACM formatting instructions. Alterations of spacing, font size, and other changes that deviate from the instructions may result in desk rejection without further review.

• By submitting to the Q-SE workshop, authors acknowledge that they are aware of and agree to be bound by the ACM Policy and Procedures on Plagiarism and the IEEE Plagiarism FAQ. In particular, papers submitted to Q-SE 2022 must not have been published elsewhere and must not be under review or submitted for review elsewhere whilst under consideration for Q-SE 2022. Contravention of this concurrent submission policy will be deemed a serious breach of scientific ethics, and appropriate action will be taken in all such cases. To check for double submission and plagiarism issues, the chairs reserve the right to (1) share the list of submissions with the PC Chairs of other conferences with overlapping review periods and (2) use external plagiarism detection software, under contract to the ACM or IEEE, to detect violations of these policies.

• The Q-SE 2022 workshop will employ a double-anonymous review process. Thus, no submission may reveal its authors’ identities. The authors must make every effort to honor the double-anonymous review process. In particular:

  • Authors’ names must be omitted from the submission.
  • All references to the author’s prior work should be in the third person.
  • Authors are encouraged to title their submission differently than preprints of the authors on ArXiV or similar sites. During review, authors should not publicly use the submission title.

Further advice, guidance, and explanation about the double-anonymous review process can be found in the ICSE 2022’s Q&A page.

• By submitting to the Q-SE workshop, authors acknowledge that they conform to the authorship policy of the ACM and the authorship policy of the IEEE.

Submission Link

Submissions to the workshop that meet the above requirements can be made via https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=qse2022 by the submission deadline. Any submission that does not comply with these requirements may be desk rejected without further review.

We encourage the authors to upload their paper information early (and submit the PDF later) to properly enter conflicts for double-anonymous reviewing. Authors are encouraged to try out the experimental SIGSOFT Submission Checker to detect violations to the formatting and double anonymous guidelines. (Mind that the tool is based on heuristics. Therefore, it may miss violations, and it can raise false alarms. The requirements listed in this call for papers take precedence over the results of the tool when deciding whether a paper meets the submission guidelines.)

Withdrawing a Submission

Authors can withdraw their submission at any moment until the final decision has been made, through the paper submission system. Resubmitting the paper to another venue before the final decision has been made without withdrawing from Q-SE 2022 first is considered a violation of the concurrent submission policy, and will lead to automatic rejection from Q-SE 2022 as well as any other venue adhering to this policy.

Important Dates

• Paper Submissions Deadline: January 14 21, 2022 AoE
• Acceptance Notification: February 25, 2022 AoE
• Camera Ready Deadline: March 18, 2022 AoE