AIDA-2020 1st Annual Meeting
by Jennifer Toes (CERN), 12/08/2016

Project members gathered at DESY in Hamburg at the AIDA-2020 1st Annual Meeting, June 2016 (Image: DESY)

The first AIDA-2020 Annual Meeting was held at the DESY research centre in Hamburg, Germany over 13^th-18^th June 2016, and featured a wide range of talks from 135 project participants on the status of their work from the first year of the project.

The meeting agenda included a workshop focused on the use of high-granularity silicon devices for energy and time measurement. Felix Sefkow, the Scientific Coordinator of AIDA-2020 noted: “This was a prime example on how fruitful it is to bring together people from different communities and it perfectly set the tone for the sessions that followed.”

The project’s Transnational Access programme provided an update to attendees, reporting on the high uptake of facility access units thus far and the expected levels of use over the remainder of the project.

In addition, the AIDA-2020 Proof of Concept (PoC) fund was presented and a call for applications opened. A total of €200k is available to fund up to four projects, targeted to projects with applications outside of High Energy Physics (HEP) research. The aim of this fund is to bridge the gap between the R&D phase of technology development and their market application. Applications will be accepted until 20^th October 2016.

The external scientific advisors invited to the Annual Meeting to form a Scientific Advisory Panel (SAP) noted they were impressed with the quality of reports made by project participants. The SAP congratulated the collaborative spirit of all WPs, and advocated further discussions to be held between different WPs and related communities.

Felix Sefkow commented: “It is the ambition of AIDA-2020 to provide a European forum for HEP detector developers, and the meeting was a nice step towards that goal.”