For two days the 15 PlanQK consortium partners met in virtual conference rooms in May 2020 to discuss progress on the consortium level and breakout sessions were used to work in smaller groups on detailed topics. With the help of virtual coffee breaks the informal exchange could be facilitated.
Figure 1: PlanQK Consortium Meeting May 2020
At the beginning the PlanQK management team gave an overview of the current status of the consortium work. In particular, the ongoing negotiations with several suppliers of quantum computers were reported, this topic will continue to be vigorously pursued by the management team. In addition, the accompanying research had invited to several workshops on the topic of business model development in April. Due to the corona-related relocation of these workshops to virtual space, the number of participants had to be reduced in order to ensure a high degree of interactivity. Thus the consortium meeting was used to discuss the results within the whole consortium.
Subsequently, the status of the individual working complexes was presented. These work complexes form the organisational structure of the project and each of them represents certain sub-goals. Examples are the analysis of quantum algorithms, the processing of the use cases, the architecture of the platform or the exploitation on the market. In normal consortium work, each consortium partner contributes according to its own expertise in the relevant work complexes. Therefore, the opportunity was taken enthusiastically to present and discuss the state of the developments to all.
In the afternoon and the next day, the remaining time was used for intensive work in small groups in breakout sessions. In the first forum, the development status of the platform and especially the underlying data model was discussed. In the meantime, the requirements were refined and important decisions for the design of the platform were made. In further small groups the use cases were discussed in detail to incorporate the knowledge of all consortium partners. A special focus was the transformation of the problem definition into a mathematical formulation. This is necessary to enable the creation of code suitable for quantum computers.
Figure 2: Group picture from the consortium meeting