Edinburgh's Quantum Software Lab in high spirits after the Quantum Fringe festival

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Physics World has a lovely feature on the University of Edinburgh's Quantum Software Lab and its Quantum Fringe festival. The lab has grown from 15 researchers in 2023 to nearly 100 staff, and it has a strategic partnership with the UK's National Quantum Computing Centre. Its focus is building practical software for quantum computers, rather than the hardware that usually grabs the headlines. That is impressive growth for a university group

The Quantum Fringe started in 2025 to mark UNESCO's International Year of Quantum Science and Technology, and it borrows its name from Edinburgh's famous Fringe festival. This year's event had 16 community driven activities covering research, industry and education. It is a nice example of a research group making the effort to reach people outside academia. Edinburgh is the perfect home for something like this

Highlights included the TartanQEC workshop on quantum error correction, which brought together more than 120 researchers from the UK and Europe, and a summer school teaching high school students the basics of quantum computing and coding. There was also a week long programme on the Isle of Skye for postgraduates and early career researchers, industry workshops on defence, benchmarking and logistics, and an evening called Quantum Worlds that mixed music, poetry and quantum physics. ETH Zurich's Andreas Wallraff gave a keynote on superconducting quantum computers

Lab director Elham Kashefi, who is also chief scientist at the National Quantum Computing Centre, made a point that ties into a lot of our recent threads. She said quantum computing is almost always told as a hardware story, but a machine only matters if it can give a useful answer that can be trusted, and that is a software problem. Given how much attention goes on qubit counts, that is a refreshing perspective

It is good to see Scotland punching above its weight in quantum. Would you go to a quantum festival if one came near you? And do you think software is being overlooked in the quantum race?

Festival season finds Quantum Software Lab in high spirits - Physics Worldphysicsworld.com