Cordination meeting minutes

Date : 2024/01/18

Attendees : Adnan Ghribi [AG], Sabrina Lecerf [SL], Thomas Shea [TS], Giuanluca Valentino [GV], Annika Eichler [AE], Adrian Oftiger [AO], Emmanuel Detsis [ED], Jonas L’Haridon [JL], Stefano Pioli [SL], Carsten Welsh [CW], Andrew Mistry [AM], Ivan Knezevic [IV], Jade Varin [JV]

Absent (distribution) : Evalds Urtans [EU], Verena Kain [VK], Christine Darve [CD], Jim Dowling [JD], Amelia Pollard [AP]

Round table on the advancement of each WP

 WP 1 Management [SL] :

• Help the other WPs to carry on their work
• Link with the EC
• Annual workshop with specific meetings with the differents boards (travel costs will be provide by the WP1)
• Mid term meeting, most important meeting (town meeting).
• Negociation of the GA and CA
• Innovation fund to fund PhD programs for subjects that could be critical and not identified at the beginning of the project. To be discussed with CW and TS (cf i-Fast)

[Action -> all] Send list of partners to SL/JV

WP 2 Communication [ED] :

• Needs update for task 3, 2.1
• Discussion with WP4 to Insert dissemination with specific communities.
• Have an external advisory board/observers (25 persons) to obtain a feedback on the guidelines.
• Think if other WPs could need these observers.
• Issue about task 2.2. Try to find solution for the person in charge of the task to be involved in the project.
• We can decide from the strart to go with Natural Langage Processing (NLP) for impact assessment and look for another partner for this task.
• Need to try to find a new partner or a subcontractor.
• Meeting to improve and finalize task 2.3.
• Budget only for ESF. Estimation around 800k for WP2

[Action -> SL] Meeting to be organized with WP1 (ED, JL, SL, JV)

WP 3 : Training [CW]

• Completed the information on the portal
• Short conversation around the innovation funds

[Action -> SL] Organize a specific meeting on the possibility of having an innovation fund in the project (cc CW, TS, AG, AO, SL, JV)

•    Consolidating the program
• Working on an update of WP3 implementation (tasks and miletones)
• Need to make the most accurate list about training programs connected to the project (see traning programs in Germany)
• [AG] There are data challenges that can be organized in France and can already be funced by large computing infrastructures (EX. Training on Jean-Zay machine at IDRIS)
• [AO] Review of the study cases with [AG] and [CW]. Either a selection of study cases (with priority to study cases not included in technical work-packages). Publication of the white paper should be done in the next two weeks in order to include it as a reference in the proposal

[Action -> AO]

• [AE] Why not consider all cases, including those in LoI (letters of intent) and already included in WP and Tasks in order to strengthen our case.
• Meeting with Hopswork to include Lex Avstreikh in the training part (platform, support, infrastructure, expertise)
• Meeting with Andrea Latina on CLIC and CLEAR : possibility to use CLEAR as a training platform.
• No updates on the budget. 
  

WP 4 Ai guidelines [GV]

• New deputy lead Evalds Urtans from RTU
• New tasks for this WP
• Meeting Andrea Latina to give more in-kind contributions in command and control specifications
• GV Sent the risks and a draft of the budget to SL and JV
• Discussion with some partners to have the final figures

WP5 Data [AM]

• Define all the tasks, milestones and deliverables
• Budget almost final
• Crossovers with other WPs to be  strengthened

[Action -> AM] New version will be sent to Sabrina next week

• Meeting with a new potential academic partner
• EOSC contact with established link with an HORIZON-INFRA-2024-EOSC-01-05 proposal (LUMEN) to be submitted this spring. In this contact, we might add OPERAS RI as an observer. The idea would be to have the outputs of the project prepare a future AI enabled EOSC node.
• No feedback for ESA

WP 6 Methodology and tools [AE]

• Almost finalized discussion with potential partners
• Finalize version of WP description and 1st draft version of the budget was sent 

WP 7 Prototypes [SP]

• 1st draft of the budget

[Action -> SP] Meeting about EOSC interface with AM, IK and Kevin Cassou 

• Finalizing the budget with the other task leaders

[Action -> SP] Final draft with the risk will be send to Sabrina next week

Risk table [SL]

•    Needs to be filled by all WP Leaders and sent to Sabrina for Monday 22nd

[Action -> all WP leaders]

Summary of costs estimates [AG]

Based on the information received so far, we are 3.5 M over budget.

[Action -> all] All WP leaders need to review and reduce their budgets

Please review carefully the minimum requirements to achieve the target deliverables and cut where possible. Possible ways to reduce budgets would be :
-    Reduce travel budget ;
-    Review and change profiles of HR to be hired (junior instead of senior where possible) ;
-    Review operation cost and try to switch it to in-kind ;
-    Review cases that can fit in data challenge or exchange programs without having a significant impact on WPs objectives.
-    Review tasks and subtasks redundancies with other WPs (ex. Travels)

[AE] has made assumptions on ways to calculate travel expenses but is not sure if it is the right way. We therefore need to harmonize our way of calculating travel expenses. 

[Action -> all] Please send back to JV and SL the hypothesis that you took for such calculation.

JV will harmonize it and then we will agree on one common way to calculate travel expenses.

Draft writing and proofreading [AG]

AG and TS started working on excellence and impact. A target would be to have a draft ready for review for the excellence by Jan. 26^th.

[Action  AG]

Will then follow the co-writing of the impact part. A two steps review is foreseen. The first step for early stage draft review (may be incomplete) by AO, CW, GV and ED. The second step review will be made by the rest of WPs leaders.

Implementation compilation is ongoing and will be slightly updated with regard to the narrative agreed upon in the excellence and impact parts.

The deadline to have a complete proposal is 12^th of February (Proposal Check Event for Horizon Europe Research Infrastructures Topics 2024 organized by the RICH Europe project). [AO] Our project is preselected for this proposal check.

Summary of action items

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