On the centenary of the publication of the works of Born, Heisenberg and Jordan (+info), the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has declared 2025 the International Year of Quantum Science and Technology (IYQ). The year-long global initiative will promote numerous initiatives aimed at raising public awareness of the importance of quantum science and its applications.
The PQHack 2025 competition, organised by the Quantum Science and Technology Centre (CiTeQ) and hosted by the Physics and Astronomy Department of the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Porto (FCUP), took place on 8 and 9 February.
Over the course of a weekend, 39 participants in 12 teams competed to solve a set of Quantum Machine Learning (QML) challenges using Qadence, proposed by a team of experts.
‘SZS’, was the big winner of first quantum hackathon in the country, and it’s in this team that we find the Master’s student in Artificial Intelligence (M.IA) David Mesquita Scarin (first on the picture) who, together with Lucas Almeida (M:EF) and Carlos Felgueiras (University of Lisbon), won 1st place and a cash prize of 700 euros.
The other winning teams can be found on the event’s website.
PQHack is part of IQC25, an international hackathon circuit that will end with QuantathonV2, a championship that will take place from 10 to 12 October 2025 at the Darla Moore School of Business at the University of South Carolina.
Foto: FCUP