Dear Colleagues,

We are pleased to announce the FORCE 2026 Workshop on Foundations of Reliable Classical-Quantum Engineering, which will be co-located with the IEEE/IFIP DSN 2026 conference, taking place from June 22-25, 2025 in Charlotte, NC, USA

https://sites.google.com/view/force2026/home

Quantum computing and networking are revolutionizing the landscape of computational systems, presenting a unique set of challenges in ensuring system dependability. As Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) devices struggle with higher error rates than classical computers, new approaches are required for error management, software verification, and system dependability in these hybrid quantum-classical environments.

The FORCE 2025 workshop will bring together quantum computing and dependability experts to address critical issues in quantum system reliability, focusing on methodologies, fault tolerance, error mitigation, and the integration of quantum devices into traditional infrastructures.

Key Topics:

We invite submissions that address dependability aspects of quantum systems, including but not limited to:

• Dependable system architectures and interfaces for fault-tolerant hybrid quantum-classical HPC computing
• Characterization and modeling of quantum noise sources and decoherence effects
• Reliability assessment of quantum control systems and interfaces
• Integration of hardware topology, error and noise models with compilation and transpilation frameworks
• Quantum error detection, correction, mitigation, and suppression techniques and their challenges
• Testing methodologies for quantum algorithms and their physical implementation
• Benchmarking quantum system reliability
• Validation of hybrid quantum-classical systems
• Dependable integration of quantum devices with classical infrastructures
• Side-channel attacks and countermeasures in quantum systems
• Privacy-preserving quantum computation
• Trust and certification of quantum devices
• Software tools for quantum reliability assessment
• Programming models for dependable quantum-classical HPC applications
• Standardization of quantum reliability metrics

Submission Details:

All accepted papers will be included in the DSN-W supplement to the DSN Proceedings and made available on IEEE Xplore.

• Submission Deadline: March 31th, 2025 (AoE)
• Notification of Acceptance: April 30th, 2025 (AoE)
• Camera Ready Submission: May 10th, 2025 (AoE)

Submissions must follow the IEEE Computer Society camera-ready format (8.5″x11″, two-column layout, 10-point font, 12-point single-spaced leading). Templates are available on the IEEE conference template page.

• Short Papers (up to 4 pages, including references)
• Regular Papers (up to 8 pages, including references)

Submission link: https://easychair.org/my2/conference?conf=dsn_2026

When clicking on "make a new submission" you will be redirected to a page where  you can select our "Foundations Of Reliable Classical-quantum Engineering" workshop.

Each accepted paper must have 1 distinct workshop or full conference registration to be included in the proceedings. The author registration deadline is  May 10th 2026. Registration details can be found here: https://dsn2026.github.io/registration.html 

Organizing Committee:

• Edoardo Giusto, University of Naples Federico II - egiusto@ieee.org - General Co-Chair
• Betis Baheri, State University of New York - Canton, baherib@canton.edu - General Co-Chair

Program Committee:

• Carmen Almudever, Technical University of Valencia

• Betis Baheri, SUNY Canton

• Alessandro Cilardo, University of Naples Federico II

• Olivia Di Matteo, University of British Columbia

• Edoardo Giusto, University of Naples Federico II

• Hailong Jiang, Youngstown State University

• Zhiding Liang, Chinese University Hong Kong

• Nicola Mazzocca, University of Naples Federico II

• Safa Shubbar, SUNY Canton

• Santiago Núñez-Corrales, NCSA/UIUC

• Ed Younis, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

For further information, please visit the FORCE 2026 website.

We look forward to your contributions and to an exciting and collaborative workshop!

Best regards,

Edoardo Giusto, General Co-Chair

Betis Baheri, General Co-Chair