QuSoft, the first research center dedicated to quantum software, was launched on 3 December 2015. This joint initiative of CWI, the University of Amsterdam and VU University will be located at Amsterdam Science Park in The Netherlands. QuSoft’s mission is to develop new protocols, algorithms and applications that can be run on small and medium-sized prototypes of a quantum computer. Its main focus is the development of quantum software, requiring fundamentally different techniques and approaches from conventional software. QuSoft will specifically target few-qubit applications, quantum testing and debugging, quantum architecture and quantum cryptography.

Lynda Hardman (CWI) has been elected President of the Board of Informatics Europe, the European association of computer science departments and research laboratories, starting from January 2016. ERCIM and Informatics Europe have agreed to increase cooperation on activities that are relevant to both organisations. Hardman succeeds Carlo Ghezzi (Politecnico di Milano, Italy). The election took place at the annual General Assembly during the 11th European Computer Science Summit in Vienna, Austria.

As announced in the July issue of ERCIM News, the IFIP (International Federation for Information Processing) Technical Committee 6’s (TC6’s) open digital library: http://dl.ifip.org/ is up and running. TC6 deals with Communication Systems and organizes a number of conferences in this area each year. Proceedings of some 30 TC6 conferences are available in the library. The library also gives access to many other IFIP conferences so that the overall number of conferences covered is more than 140. In contrast to other digital libraries, IFIP TC6 does not charge authors for getting their papers published therein.