While it has been known for some time that quantum computers could in principle solve problems that are intractable on today’s supercomputers such as breaking public key cryptography and solving hard computational chemistry problems, the field of quantum computing is still at an early stage. Recent progress in realizing small scale quantum computers is encouraging and these devices may scale up further in the near future. However, currently, only very few opportunities exist to bring quantum computing experts together with experts from other computer science fields with much to offer: programming languages, compiler design, computer architecture, and design automation in an exchange of ideas.

The Next Steps in Quantum Computing workshop aims at bridging this gap and to bring together an interdisciplinary crowd with broad participation of colleagues from classical computer science disciplines as well as domain-experts from quantum computing. Researchers in the US as well as decision makers in US government agencies are the intended target audience, but the workshop is meant to be inclusive. The general organization will allow to have ample time for discussions and personal interactions to facilitate community building around the quantum computing vision and provide a natural entry point for computer scientists who are not yet actively participating in quantum computing.

The workshop aims to bring together researchers from quantum computing, computer architecture, electronic design automation, compiler construction, and classical programming languages. Open questions that we anticipate this group to tackle include new methods for circuit synthesis and optimization, compiler optimizations and rewriting, embedded languages versus non-embedded languages, implementations of type systems and error reporting for quantum languages, and techniques for verifying the correctness of quantum programs.