QUBITECH organised and hosted the AQIPCS Portfolio Meeting in Heraklion, Crete, on 27 and 28 October 2026. The meeting was held in the frame of the HEISINGBERG EIC Pathfinder project, in support of the portfolio activities, and brought together representatives of the projects that form the Alternative Quantum Information Processing, Communication and Sensing (AQIPCS) Portfolio of the European Innovation Council (EIC). Over the two days, delegations from the VeriQuB, PANDA, IQARO and ARTEMIS projects joined the HEISINGBERG consortium to present their most recent scientific and technological highlights and to work through open scientific questions in small, focused working groups. The format favoured hands-on exchange over plenary presentation, allowing researchers working on photonic, superconducting and hybrid quantum platforms to compare results, identify complementarities and align their plans for the final year of the portfolio.
The AQIPCS Portfolio is the structured collaboration mechanism that the European Innovation Council has put in place for the eight projects funded under the EIC Pathfinder Challenge on alternative approaches to quantum information processing, communication and sensing. Launched in Brussels in November 2023 and guided by a joint Strategic Plan published by the EIC, the portfolio spans 56 partner organisations across 15 EU member states and three non-EU countries. Its four strategic goals are to build a sustainable, fully European value chain for alternative quantum technologies, to stimulate private investment for technological upscaling, to support research policy-making, and to nurture a highly qualified European quantum workforce. Portfolio-level meetings such as the one in Heraklion are the practical instrument through which these goals are pursued, complementing the quarterly Steering Committee sessions held at EISMEA in Brussels.
QUBITECH’s role as organiser and host follows naturally from its position within HEISINGBERG, where it is a key technical partner alongside UBITECH, the project coordinator, and research partners including FORTH, the University of Cambridge, Sapienza University of Rome and CSIC. HEISINGBERG, funded by the EIC Pathfinder under Grant Agreement No 101114978, is developing a spatial photonic spin simulator capable of coupling 10,000 spins and bringing it into the quantum regime through squeezed-light driving, a line of work that sits at the heart of QUBITECH’s quantum and quantum-inspired computing activities, including its Spatial Photonic Ising Machine and Ising-as-a-Service offerings.
The organisation of the meeting was led by Dr Simos Tsintzos, Technology Director of QUBITECH, who commented: “Hosting the AQIPCS community in Crete was a privilege and a responsibility. Alternative quantum platforms will only reach the market if the teams building them talk to each other early and often, and the working-group format in Heraklion gave us exactly that. As we enter the final year of the portfolio, the connections strengthened here between photonic, superconducting and verification-oriented projects are what will turn individual results into a coherent European capability.”
