At the school where I teach, the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), 1/3rd of the carbon footprint for the campus comes from flying faculty and staff to a variety of conferences and meetings. The good news is that telepresencing can reduce the climate footprint of an academic conference by a factor of 100 or more.
However, the academic conference still has a range of issues...
I'll mention some lessons learned from organizing two online events:
1) The Latin American Workshop on Observational Cosmology (www.ictp-saifr.org/lawoc2020)
2) The IV Joint ICTP-Trieste/ICTP-SAIFR School on Cosmology: Challenges for the Standard Cosmological Model
(www.ictp-saifr.org/cosmo2021)
The RECONNECT conference (Remote Conference on New Concepts in Particle Theory) was an international conference, organised by the IPPP in Durham during the first months of the corona pandemic. With this first edition we aimed to provide a forum in which the whole theoretical community can share the latest ideas that drive our field. I will briefly review the challenges and opportunities of the...
Neutrino 2020 was planned to be held in downtown Chicago, but in March 2020 we had to re-plan it in 3 months as an entirely online conference due to COVID-19. I will summarize how we did this, what worked and what did not, and some of the things we learned about the future of conferences in the process.
Writing papers and giving talks at conferences (or seminars at institutes) were pretty good 20th Century ways to share our research with each other. Now that we're in the 21st Century we can try to take advantage of 21st Century tools. On my own and with others I've been trying to think about what this means in practice. Early experiments are the Cosmology from Home conference (a conference...
H02020 took place in June last year and was the European Southern Observatory's e-conference. Originally planned as a classical conference to be held in Munich, we decided to convert the meeting to the virtual domain less than 3 months before the starting date. With little time to prepare and no real blueprint to go by, our goals were to conduct a scientifically engaging meeting and to draw...
More than 1000 researchers gathered online for the inaugural Photonics Online Meetup (POM, http://photonicsonlinemeetup.org/) on January 13th 2020. They simultaneously attend the five hours conference either alone from their personal computer or at their university from hubs distributed across five continents and many time zones.
The organization started in September 2019 with seven members...
The crisis occasioned by the coronavirus pandemic should give rise to major questions about our collective futures as academics, no matter what our disciplines. The cancellation of many in person academic conferences has been accompanied by a flourishing of online events organised through various platforms. Disability rights groups point out that they have demanded more accessible events over...
Global, international cooperation is the basis of our large-scale HEP facilities and already at times of the cold war the HEP community was able to foster international cooperation also in political areas far beyond physics. Gerhard Knies, a former physicist at DESY, applied the HEP- community’s spirit of cooperation to the renewable energy sector in 2009, when he initiated the DESERTEC...
The necessary reduction of CO 2 emissions will not only require greener electricty production, but will also increase the demand for electricity. Using yearly a TWh of electricity to run an accelerator (as FCC-ee) will be increasingly hard to justify to the public and policy makers. How much can CERN produce on its own with an aggressive solar-panel deployment strategy? I’ll give a few...
- What are the advantages, challenges, and opportunities of online
meetings? - How did online seminars, workshops, and conferences change
as we grew accustomed to them? - How can we make online meetings an
attractive alternative to (complement) in-person meetings?
Having had the opportunity to co-organize multiple online meetings -- from established skype-seminars that took...
The ATLAS Open Data project for education aims to deliver reliable and easy-to-setup resources for teaching High Energy Physics and the related computer sciences. Because of the worldwide nature of our target audience, university students and their trainers, this requires building resources on top of open-source tools that allow others to use them freely and to contribute to their development....
Whether becuase of the COVID-19 pandemic or because of the desire to reduce our carbon footprint, HEP has had even more remote meetings than we previously had.
Students and younger members of our collaborations, who haven't yet built a strong network within the field because this is typically done locally or through in-person meetings, are overwhelmingly feeling isolated and unable to build...
Awareness of diversity goes beyond simply following the regulations set down at institutions. The collective mindset that drives the lack of diversity must be carefully examined and addressed. In this flash talk, I would like to discuss a concept of taking the academic route by organizing discussion sessions around journal articles written on diversity in academia. At DESY, we have...
In a world with zero net carbon emission (hopefully in 2050), it will be likely conferences will be more often virtual. However virtual conferences have the main drawback to lack of conviviality, and informal discussions that turn out often fruitful.
In March 2021, GatherTown software has been tested during a virtual national workshop. We will present the outcome of this experience, that...
We are all here for a sustainable HEP. But what does sustainability mean? It does not mean less carbon emitted---it means a genuinely circular way of living in the world. HEP depends on complex computing infrastructure and large devices which are made of metal mined from the earth that cannot always be recycled. All HEP infrastructure emits carbon. Climate change is urgent. Is particle...
Covid-19 pandemic has had a tremendous impact on every aspect of our society. As scientists, we had to adapt to the new reality in an instant. Considering academia has deeply rooted traditions and prescribed formulae on how certain things are done, we were and still are faced with challenges of everyday work life. Conferences and workshops, being one important facet of the scientific job, are...
Even outside of pandemic circumstances, a virtual seminar series can offer the opportunity to connect a broader community that one might not reach through a conference. Quantum Gravity Across approaches is such a seminar series.
The seminar series is organized by Sebastian Fischetti, Aaron Held, Sebastian Steinhaus and myself, each of us coming from a different direction of Quantum Gravity....
Do we need to travel to support international collaboration? If the last year has shown us anything, the short answer seems to be no but with room for improvement. RemotelyGreen is a hybrid organisation with its roots in a series of Geneva-based hackathons back in 2019, before the pandemic. Its vision is to see remote collaboration be the norm, even in a post-COVID world, given it can reduce...
The reality of large international conferences is that they pose a considerable risk to the environment. This is a long recognised fact [Reay2003], yet until 2020 little has been done specifically for conferences. The carbon footprint per paper was estimated by one study to be 801kg of CO$_2$ [Spinellis 2013], this is obviously not an insignificant amount and thus efforts and techniques to...
I will share my experience with remote interaction techniques bases on exchange of patches to SVG files. Advantages and disadvantages comparing with alternative methods (Zoom, Google Talk) will be discussed.
I would like to give a Flash Talk to start a discussion on the responsibility of scientists in the society. Can and should serious scientific work be combined with activism? What are the dangers and advantages? How to deal with a situation where the gap between what scientifically makes sense and the political norm is growing. The talk should stimulate discussion rather than provide answers,...
The long-term sustainability of the research software ecosystem is particularly important for HEP, given that the HL-LHC and other facilities of the 2020s will be relevant through at least the 2030s. To prepare a workforce that meets our software challenges, the HSF along with its partners: IRIS-HEP, FIRST-HEP and the Carpentries has implemented a vision of software training with a focus on...
The way of sharing information between scientists has changed from personal letters to live-streaming of breakthroughs, as it occurred with the announcements of the Higgs discovery or with the gravitational wave detection. In 2015, the Latin American Webinars on Physics (lawphysics) was created by postdocs and PhDs from Latin America but dispersed across the world. This is a webinar cycle...
A possible Dark Matter model postulates that it interacts with Standard Model particles only through a massive photon-like vector particle, called dark photon or A'. The PADME experiment at the DAFNE Beam-Test Facility (BTF) of the INFN Frascati National Laboratory (LNF) is designed to detect dark photons produced in positron on fixed target annihilations decaying to dark matter (e+e- → gamma...
The thirst for knowledge that drives people is to unearth the nature. The fundamental laws are hidden in nature at the small scales and to explore this innermost structure of nature, study has been done with particle physics. A facility with latest technologies and prospects adding the ideas for promising new avenues of investigation in the field of particle physics experiment does exist as...
Over the past year, many of us have experienced positive and negative sides of online conferences. A big challenge of online platforms is in hosting a venue for further discussions on the spot among participants. In this talk, we would like to share our experience in architecting an online environment to accommodate this while trying to bring online one of the long-run semiannual Physics...
We propose a fundamental change to the way we organize conferences. Covid taught us that we can interact effectively online, but covid also taught us that meeting in person is crucial. We see a future in which large conferences like ICHEP are organized differently, in a way that stimulates high-quality content, facilitates person-to-person contact while significantly reducing the environmental impact.
Due to the pandemic, we have experienced two very different modes of working in the past 2 years: A primacy of offline interactions before it and nearly-exclusive online communication during it. This leads to a question about how professional cooperation will be organized in the future. I will argue that we should strive for a diversity of answers, where the proportion of online vs. offline...
Particle accelerators are essential tools for high energy physics and other research directions. After accelerating a primary charged particle beam these facilities generate specific radiation in a second step. The desired secondary radiation could be synchrotron radiation, free electron laser (FEL) pulses, neutrons, or exotic particles by colliding beams for HEP research. The entire process...
Decarbonizing our research is imperative, both since it's our generic responsibility as well as to future-proof our ability to conduct research in 10-20 years time. We will showcase our astronomical institutes CO2 self-assessment and want to encourage you to implement similar monitoring schemes at your home institutions. Since current flying and computing use have a critically high CO2...
An increasingly important aspect of working and living conditions in current times is environmental sustainability, both concerning us as scientists as well as the planet as the basis on which we perform our research.
Being at the forefront of knowledge and innovation, in the young High Energy Physicist Association (yHEP), we take our responsibility as drivers of change and innovation...
Particle accelerators in general and Energy Recovery Linacs (ERLs) in particular, consume a large amount of electricity and emit a large amount of carbon dioxide. Considering ERL's R&D, to continue to gain the support of society, efforts such as energy saving of accelerators and utilization of natural energy are indispensable. In addition, further efforts should be done to build a clean...
The environmental impact of the LHCb experiment and its upgrade has been estimated in terms of CO_2 equivalents. We take into account the effects of travel (conference and collaboration weeks), electricity usage (magnet and online computing), flour-carbon gas leaks, and the lifecycle impact of new muon shield to be installed for the upgrade. This talk will present an overview of the...
