Join Our Growing Quantum Community

Qiskit Fall Fest experiences—lessons learned and project demos.

This year's Qiskit Fall Fest brought together hundreds of participants across 30 universities to push the boundaries of what's possible with near-term quantum hardware. The projects that stood out shared a common theme—pragmatic solutions to real quantum development pain points rather than flashy theoretical demonstrations.

One team from TU Delft built a noise-aware quantum circuit compiler that reduced gate counts by 35% for specific chemistry simulations on IBM's 27-qubit processors. Their key insight? Accounting for the actual error rates of each qubit during transpilation, not just connectivity constraints. The trade-off between circuit depth and fidelity became a recurring discussion point across multiple projects.

A University of Chicago group tackled the often-overlooked challenge of quantum debugging. Their open-source tool visualizes how noise propagates through circuits, helping identify which gate sequences contribute most to errors. Early tests showed users could improve algorithm success rates by 20% just by spotting problematic subcircuits.

The most surprising trend was the rise of hybrid classical-quantum middleware. Three separate teams developed variations on runtime systems that dynamically switch between quantum and classical processing based on real-time device metrics. One implementation even used machine learning to predict when quantum execution would likely outperform classical alternatives for a given subproblem.

Hardware limitations forced creative workarounds. Multiple teams reported that error mitigation techniques consumed more quantum resources than the actual computation, sparking debates about when mitigation helps versus when it's better to just run more shots. The consensus? Mitigation pays off only for carefully selected intermediate-scale circuits.

For those who missed the event, the standout projects will be featured in an upcoming Qiskit community demo day. The main takeaway? The quantum ecosystem is maturing—less "look what quantum can theoretically do" and more "here's how we made it work today with all the imperfections."