Manuel Wimmer

Manuel Wimmer is full professor and head of the Institute of Business Informatics - Software Engineering at the Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria. His research interests comprise foundations of software engineering and applications in various fields such as software modernization, cyber-physical systems, digital twins, and quantum computing. He serves as Associate EiC of IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering and as Associate Editor for Software and Systems Modeling and Business & Information Systems Engineering. He is a founding member and serves as program committee co-chair for the IEEE International Conference on Quantum Software (QSW).

Quantum Software Design and Synthesis

Nowadays, the processing of quantum information is frequently defined by quantum circuits residing in hybrid quantum-classical software systems. However, designing such circuits is challenging, requiring significant knowledge of quantum information theory as well as an increasing amount of software engineering expertise. This lecture explores how quantum circuits can be represented, generated, and manipulated by reusing and adapting concepts, techniques, and methods from software engineering. First, we introduce the fundamental components of quantum circuits and examine them through the lens of software language engineering. Building on this foundation, we introduce different encodings of quantum circuits, paving the way for their manipulation by AI techniques. In particular, we focus on engineering tasks such as quantum circuit synthesis, optimisation, and debugging. Taking this software engineering perspective enables participants to model and improve quantum circuits, which will be essential skills for building the future quantum-classical software systems.