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30.9.2025
Veena Vijayakumar, Frances Poblete, Ben Castanon

A Recap on unitaryCON 2025

Dear UF Community,

unitaryCON 2025 was a massive success! From September 2–4, 2025, we brought close to 100 Unitary Foundation community members together—members, advisors, current and former micrograntees, staff, and collaborators—for our annual, high-energy gathering dedicated to pushing the Quantum Open Source Software (QOSS) ecosystem forward.

Hosted in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and running alongside IEEE Quantum Week, this year’s event was a critical forum for sharing progress and mapping out our future strategy. The agenda was packed with great content: insightful intro talks, technical deep-dives from featured speakers, hands-on breakout sessions, and participant-driven ‘unconference’ discussions. If you’d like to see the full schedule and talk abstracts, be sure to check out the unitaryCON 2025 webpage here.

The key focus? Building robust, platform-agnostic tools. We spent a lot of time tackling challenges in quantum compilation, error correction (QEC) toolkits, and standardized SDKs, all with the goal of making quantum programs easier to access, verify, and run efficiently on any hardware. unitaryCON reinforced the idea that open standards and community collaboration are the fastest way to get to the quantum future.

2025 unitaryCON group photo Group selfie during the conference

Tuesday, September 2nd (Day 0)

On Tuesday night, we gathered at the Smoky Note in the Nob Hill neighborhood of Albuquerque to welcome all attendees. IEEE Week has tons of activities for attendees, and it was great to connect with many micrograntees, maintainers, partners and friends before the workshop sessions kicked off.

2025 unitaryCON pre-event Photos during the welcome event

I must say that this is my favorite conference, and it’s because I share the passion of others for open-source quantum software. So meeting each year with them and seeing the amazing projects they are bringing to the community is special.

Wednesday, September 3rd (Day 1)

Welcome Talks

Our first official day of unitaryCON was focused on project updates and presentations from both emerging professionals and veterans within the field. The day started with short welcome talks from UF President Will Zeng and unitaryCON Co-Director Veena Vijayakumar.

UF welcomes were followed by welcomes from colleagues in the local (Mountain West) Quantum ecosystem including Dr. Ivan Deutsch from University of New Mexico and Jake Douglass from Sandia National Labs and Elevate Quantum. Both Ivan and Jake did a wonderful job of painting a portrait of the extensive research and collaborative work being done across institutions in the Mountain West.

2025 unitaryCON intro speakers Intro Speakers from left to right: Veena Vijayakumar, Dr. Will Zeng, Dr. Ivan Deutsch, and Jake Douglass

The day continued with 5 featured speakers who have been making strides in industry. Dr. Lukas Burgholzer from TUM & MQSC presented the newest developments with the Munich Quantum toolkit, particularly MQT Bench, their open-source benchmarking framework. Tom Hartley from Riverlane introduced (and shared a private beta of) Deltakit, Riverlane’s newest Python library for QEC researchers that makes it easy to run QEC experiments in simulation and real hardware using Stim. Ryan Hill from qBraid demonstrated the newest updates and the benefits of the platform agnostic qBraid-SDK. Kai-Hsin Wu from QuEra introduced Bloqade, an open-source Python SDK designed for programming neutral atom quantum computers. And finally Dr. Luciano Bello from IBM presented the newest updates to Qiskit 2.x and shared all of the community initiatives (both new and old) that IBM has been fostering.

To read more in-depth abstracts for each featured talk, check out the unitaryCON webpage.

2025 unitaryCON featured talk speakers Featured Talk Speakers from left to right: Dr. Lukas Burgholzer, Tom Hartley, Ryan Hill, Kai-Hsin Wu, and Dr. Luciano Bello

Lighting Talks

After a short break following the Featured Talks, we had 10 community members come up and share their project updates. These speakers submitted to a Call for Proposals that UF put out in early August and were chosen from 30+ submissions. The speakers were Dr. Lia Yeh (“ZXLive: drag-and-drop to draw and apply ZX-calculus”); Catalina Albornoz (“The Quantum Compilation hub: centralizing the scattered knowledge on quantum compilation”); Zefan Du (“CCMap: Lightweight Compiler Integration for Chiplet-Based Modular Quantum Systems”); Dr. Christa Zoufal (“Quantum Optimization Benchmarking Library — The Intractable Decathlon”); Dr. Tim Chen (“Intrinsic error mitigation in quantum-classical auxiliary-field quantum Monte Carlo”); Marlo Kuerner (“OrangeQS Juice: an open-source OS powering Quantum Experiments and Innovation”); Gennadi Ryan (“ pypiccolo, a novel julia-based python package for robotics-inspired quantum optimal control”); Dr. Elaine Wong (“Some progress on QIR-EE: A Cross-Platform Execution Engine for QIR”); Dr. Jiaqi Leng (“Quantum Advantage for Nonlinear Optimization: Theory and Open-Source Software”); and Ed Younis (“OpenQudit: Extensible and Accelerated Numerical Quantum Compilation by JIT-Compiling a Qudit Gate DSL”).

To read more in-depth abstracts for each lightning talk, check out the unitaryCON webpage.

The day ended with an hour of open networking and the group slowly made its way back into the IEEE programming afterwards.

The featured talks and the lightning talks were by far the best talks I attended at IEEE Quantum Week, and the UNM excursion was fascinating.

The open networking sessions were great for [meeting others]. This has led to some future collaboration projects that are already in the works!

2025 unitaryCON during the event Attendees during the open networking session at the end of Day 1

Thursday, September 4th (Day 2)

Unconference Sessions

Day 2 of unitaryCON was focused on group discussion and brainstorming. There were two parts of unconference sessions led by UF staff, collaborators, micrograntees, and ambassadors. The topics and leaders were as follows:

  • Part 1

    • Quantum Education led by Monica VanDieren
    • Benchmarking led by Alejandro Montanez
    • Error Correction led by Abraham Asfaw
    • Compilation led by Jordan Sullivan + Nate Stemen

  • Part 2

    • Quantum Education led by Alberto Maldonado Romo
    • Open Source Software led by Shangjie Guo
    • Error Mitigation led by Nate Stemen

Attendees walked away with potential strategies to incorporate into their own work in all of the discussion areas.

2025 unitaryCON unconference event Unconference Session Conversations and Notes

Group Excursion to University of New Mexico

The day (and conference) ended with a group excursion to University of New Mexico’s Physics campus. Professors Ivan Deutsch and Francisco Becerra showed the group around the research building and attendees were able to see the school’s research labs and other facilities that are offered as resources to students, staff, and faculty.

This excursion was a special opportunity for unitaryCON attendees to see what sorts of activities are happening in the area. The UNM campus was beautiful and the faculty and staff were all extremely knowledgeable. We are so grateful to the UNM team, particularly Dr. Ivan Deutsch and Dr. Bob Ledoux, for helping us make this happen!

2025 unitaryCON touring UNM Photos from the tour at University of New Mexico

Thank you for organizing! I really appreciate it and am thankful for the experience, especially to finally meet people with a common cause and interest.

Final Takeaways and Thank Yous

Our third edition of unitaryCON provided a safe and engaging space to discuss both the opportunities and challenges open source developers are facing in our field today. We continue to strive to create a workshop that offers something for senior researchers to curious newcomers, and a platform where all voices can be elevated and anyone can be a new collaborator. We are proud to continue to prioritize learning, accessibility, and advancing an emerging field openly and equitably. These were a special three days filled with collaboration and connection that we won’t be forgetting any time soon!

A quick thank you to all of our collaborators and sponsors who made this year’s unitaryCON possible: