Technology Product Impact

Over the course of his career, Dr. Pistoia has contributed code and technology to numerous products, in various domains.

Quantum Computing, Quantum-Inspired Classical Algorithms, and Quantum Cryptography

Dr. Marco Pistoia is one the main contributors to IBM's software stack for quantum computing, called Quantum Information Science Kit (Qiskit). Specifically, Dr. Pistoia led an international team of researchers and personally designed and contributed a large amount of code and technology to the Qiskit application components. Specifically, Dr. Pistoia contributed 53 Qiskit Aqua Community Tutorials in the areas of Artificial Intelligence, Quantum Chemistry, Finance, and Optimization. For this work, Pistoia received two IBM Corporate Awards in 2019. He is also a coauthor of the online book Learn Quantum Computation using Qiskit published by IBM.

At JPMorganChase, Pistoia created from the ground up the largest quantum group in a non-quantum company in the industry, particularly in the financial industry. His team has created over a hundred novel Quantum Computing algorithms and quantum-inspired classical algorithms (usable today) for numerous use cases, including optimization, Monte Carlo integration, fraud detection, anomaly detection, and extractive text summarization. Most notably, Pistoia has been the Principal Investigator of numerous Quantum Computing projects, particularly "Certified Randomness Using a Trapped-Ion Quantum Processor," the first demonstration worldwide of a real-world quantum application beyond the capabilities of any classical computer, published in Nature in April 2025. In addition, in the area of Quantum Cryptography, Pistoia led the team that demonstrated for the first time 800 Gbps secure connection via Quantum Key DIstribution over 100 km. Pistoia's work has focused on how to integrate Post Quantum Cryptography and Quantum Key Distribution for stronger protection of a company's infrastructure against Harvest Now Decrypt later quantum attacks.

Program Analysis and Machine Learning

In the course of his career, Dr. Pistoia has conducted research in the area of Program Analysis for code quality and security enforcement. He led the first work worldwide that demonstrated how to integrate Program Analysis with Machine Learning to dramatically reduce false positives and false negatives when performing static analysis of code. He contributed code and technology to the IBM’s products for program analysis, code quality, and security, including IBM WebSphere Application Server, IBM Rational Software Analyzer, and IBM Security AppScan Source. Pistoia published numerous journal articles and conference papers on this topic at the most important venues worldwide and received five Best Paper Awards. Specifically, the permission analysis, privileged-code analysis, and subject-rights analysis Dr. Pistoia published at OOPSLA 2002, ECOOP 2005 and ECOOP 2015, respectively, were all used against the code of IBM WebSphere Application Server to ensure proper enforcement of the Principle of Complete Privilege and the Principle of Complete Mediation.

Secure Language Design and Implementation

Dr. Pistoia was part of the IBM and Sun Microsystems joint team who designed and developed the Java 2 Standard Edition (J2SE) and Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) security models.  He is the lead author of the books Enterprise Java Security (published by Addison-Wesley in English and by Tsinghua University Press in Chinese) and Java 2 Network Security (published by Prentice Hall), both used as textbooks in many universities worldwide.  He also designed and developed two augmented security models for programming languages, published as part of the following articles: Beyond Stack Inspection: A Unified Access-Control and Information-Flow Security Model (IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy 2007) and A language for information flow: dynamic tracking in multiple interdependent dimensions (ACM SIGPLAN Workshop on Programming Languages and Analysis for Security 2008). Pistoia's code, extracted from his books (with his name officially credited) has been part of the Java SDK documentation since 1999, which means that it has been installed on tens of millions of computers worldwide.

Security Middleware for Mobile Computing

In 2012, Dr. Pistoia was one of the four IBM researchers who conceived the IBM MobileFirst Global Technology Outlook (GTO), which led to the creation of the IBM MobileFirst brand.  He actively participated in the strategic alliance of IBM and Apple, and contributed code and technology to the main IBM products in mobile computing:

1. IBM Fiberlink MaaS360

2. IBM MobileFirst Platform Development Foundation

3. IBM Tealeaf CX Mobile

4. IBM Rational Test Workbench

Dr. Pistoia has published his work on mobile computing middleware in numerous conference papers and journal articles, and in a book chapter, and has received four IBM Outstanding Technical Achievement Awards and two IBM Outstanding Innovation Awards.