Quantum Computing for Defence and Security

Dr. Hermann Hauser is an internationally successful venture capital entrepreneur, engineer, and physicist. He has played a central role in the founding of numerous companies in Silicon Fen, the "British Silicon Valley" in and around Cambridge, UK. Hermann Hauser is the co-founder of Acorn and its development of the ARM processor, which is now installed in millions of smartphones and tablets. The company is an early example of a highly successful Deep Tech start-up: founded in 1978 with £100, after 5 years the company was worth £200 million. He has founded and invested in many technology companies including Acorn, ARM, Solexa which was bout by Ilumina, CSR, Graphcore and Photonic and is former EIC Board Member and EIC Fund Board of Directors Member.

Ivan Krastev is a Bulgarian political scientist and one of Europe’s most influential public intellectuals. He is Chairman of the Centre for Liberal Strategies in Sofia and a permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) in Vienna. He is a founding board member of the European Council on Foreign Relations and sits on the boards of the International Crisis Group, the European Investment Bank and GLOBSEC. His work focuses on the political future of Europe, democracy and the crisis of liberalism. He shapes this debate as a columnist for the Financial Times and as the author of widely discussed books, including After Europe (2017), The Light that Failed (2019, with Stephen Holmes) and Is It Tomorrow Yet? (2020).

© Klaus Ranger & Zsolt Marton

Adrien Signoles is Chief Hardware Officer at Pasqal, where he leads the development, scaling and industrialization of the company’s neutral-atom quantum processors. He joined Pasqal in 2019 as one of its first quantum hardware engineers. Since then he has played a central role in its R&D, taking the technology from academic experiments to industrial-grade quantum processing units. He holds a PhD in Quantum Physics from the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. He then worked on quantum simulation with cold atoms as a postdoctoral researcher at Heidelberg University and the Institut d’Optique. His scientific work has been cited more than 2,200 times.

Dr. Arnold H. Kammel, born 1981, has been Secretary General of the
Austrian Federal Ministry of Defence since 2022 and Defence Policy
Director since 2020. He was previously an advisor in the cabinet of the
Federal Minister for EU, Arts, Culture and Media in the Federal Chan-
cellery from 2018 to 2019.

(c) BMLV

THALES Segment leader for “Quantum Algorithms and Computing” managing collaborations with French MoD PROQCIMA start-ups. Member of NATO SET-IST-339 “Investigation of military applications for Quantum Algorithms”. Coordinator of French BACQ (Application-oriented Benchmarks for Quantum Computing) project of MetriQs program. Member of the European EQCBC Committee. Contributor to the French “Academy of Technologies” report on FTQC and General Chair of QUEST-IS 2025 & 2027 conference on Quantum Engineering. Contributor to GIFAS report on quantum Technologies and French Academy of Technologies Report on FTQC. Aymé Poirson Prize 2014 of the French Academy of Science and SEE Ampere Medal.

Magdalena Hauser, B.Sc. is co-founder and Co-CEO of ParityQC, which she leads together with Prof. Wolfgang Lechner. She studied Management and Economics in Innsbruck. Before ParityQC, she was co-founder and CEO of I.E.C.T. – Hermann Hauser, which fostered entrepreneurship and helped spin-offs turn their ideas into successful companies. At the same time, she managed Hermann Hauser’s investment company in Europe (HHI), which invested mainly in deep-tech spin-offs. In total, I.E.C.T. connected more than 2,500 spin-offs with mentors, investors and serial entrepreneurs, and HHI invested in more than 20 of them. She co-founded the non-profit association AI Austria and was named to the Forbes “30 Under 30” list in 2018 for her work in investment.

Univ. Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Lechner is co-founder and Co-CEO of ParityQC and Professor at the Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of Innsbruck, where he leads a research group on quantum computing. He received his PhD in Physics from the University of Vienna in 2009. After postdoctoral positions in Amsterdam and Innsbruck, he was appointed professor in 2016. He is best known for inventing the LHZ architecture, which is the foundation of ParityQC. His research has received numerous awards, including the Google Research Faculty Award (2020), the Houska Prize (2019), the START Prize (2017), the Thirring Prize (2017) and the Loschmidt Prize (2010).