The BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Information and Communication Technologies has gone in this eighteenth edition to engineers Joan Daemen (Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands) and Vincent Rijmen (KU Leuven, Belgium and the University of Bergen, Norway) for designing the cryptographic technologies that “underpin today’s digital age,” in the words of the committee, protecting the security of “billions of connected devices globally.”

For quantum computers to function, they must be kept at extremely low temperatures. However, today’s cooling systems also generate noise that interferes with the fragile quantum information they are meant to protect. Now, researchers at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden have developed an entirely new type of minimal quantum "refrigerator", which is partly driven by the noise itself. This refrigerator enables very precise control over heat and energy flows and could play an important role in scaling up quantum technology.

A development at Stanford turns qubits, quantum bits of information, stored in atoms into light, and for the first time, collects that information using one photon for each atom simultaneously. This “parallel interface” makes it possible to get information out of the quantum computer quickly and could be scaled up to create networked quantum supercomputers.

The Hebrew University of Jerusalem is proud to announce that Prof. Guy Kindler, Dean of the School of Engineering and Computer Science, has been awarded the Michael and Sheila Held Prize by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (NAS). This $100,000 prize is one of the most prestigious honors in computer science and discrete mathematics, presented annually to recognize outstanding, innovative, and influential research in combinatorial and discrete optimization and complexity theory.

FAU will become Florida’s first university to publicly host a large, onsite quantum computer. Through a partnership with D-Wave, FAU will install the advanced Advantage2 system on its Boca Raton campus, accelerating breakthrough research, hands-on student training, and real-world applications. This milestone positions FAU as a hub for quantum education and innovation while strengthening Florida’s leadership in next-generation computing.