Transcript:
APS DPF - Task Force Plenary - - 02-01-2024
Captioned By: White Coat Captioning
>> IAN FISK: All right, I guess let's get started. Lee, are you ready
to go? Maybe it's going already. Let's get started. I have a couple of
introductory scheduling slides, and then we have a presentation today. Let
me see if I can share my screen.
All right. Are my slides visible, or not yet?
>> No. Now they're coming, yes.
>> IAN FISK: Excellent. Just a couple of quick things. So for
introduction, today we'll hear from Petra Merkel, who will speak on the
CPAD experience. That's the primary agenda item for today. This was
supposed to inspire and guide us for our task in terms of what would be
useful to know.
As we discussed last time, the CPSC doesn't exactly roll off the
tongue as a name. At the same time, as I've learned since the meeting,
choosing the CPAD name was apparently a community exercise involving votes
and people proposing the name, which is why it's a better name than ours.
I would propose not to mess with success, and to worry about the name
later in a carnival-like atmosphere with a community-building exercise, and
instead we will continue to suffer through CPSC for now.
Very few people have found time to contribute to the document. Except
to put your names down, which I appreciate that part of it. Joel, I
especially appreciate that Joel had time to put some things in. I wrote
the following in the membership section just so we would have something
today that people could argue about.
I had proposed that the CPSC will be the standing committee of the DPF
and will report to the Executive Committee. Community appointments will be
made for three-year terms renewable once and the Executive Committee will
ensure the committee is comprised of roughly equal number of lab and
university employed members. At least one member from all frontiers,
theory, and small experiments. While no targets are provided, the
Executive Committee is strongly encouraged to choose members that encourage
and forester a diverse and inclusive environment. The chair will select a
deputy if desired.
I put that into the document and I would encourage folks, if they
disagree with any of the numbers or philosophies, go ahead.
>> Are those the Snowmass 10 frontiers?
>> IAN FISK: Excellent question, I guess I had imagined them as the
Snowmass 10 frontiers. I should make that clearer. Any other questions or
comments?
>> So I was wondering, I read it as saying there has to be at least
one theorist.
>> IAN FISK: That was how I intended it.
>> RUTH V.: Okay. I'm questioning that because I feel like there are
sort of very different aspects of computational theory, like, you know,
there's sort of lattice simulations or maybe you put in cosmology
simulations, would probably have some overlap. For example there is the
Monte Carlo generator community which I think is a community relevant for
the experiments but not like necessarily all done by the experimentalists.
So I would think that you would want at least two to sort of cover
those I would say big aspects.
>> IAN FISK: All right. That's easy to do.
>> STEVE GOTTLIEB: I strongly object, I think it should be half theory
and half experiment.
>> LIZ SEXTON-KENNEDY: I mean, a theory is only one of the ten
frontiers.
>> RUTH V.: Okay. We can argue about that one.
>> LIZ SEXTON-KENNEDY: Yeah.
>> RUTH V.: Because theory isn't all the frontiers.
>> LIZ SEXTON-KENNEDY: Okay. Yeah. But why is small experiments
explicitly called out? It seems a little orthogonal to frontiers.
>> IAN FISK: I was trying to make sure -- it can be its own separate
bullet. I guess we had representatives from each of the major experimental
programs and I was trying to include the theory as well -- I'm sorry, the
small experiments.
>> The experiments had a bit of a presentation problem during
Snowmass, so it would be good to have a mechanism for avoiding these in the
future. But like, so I've done this exact thing with the organization, and
those principles are good, but then when you start saying this is going to
be really hard to do in practice. So maybe this is, what's the word, a set
of principles that we want to have for the composition but that aren't very
prescriptive because the impact is very much impossible to do.
>> IAN FISK: Okay. Daniel.
>> V. DANIEL ELVIRA: Yes. I'm wondering whether we want to write down
in the bylaws that there should be at least one representative from a given
community, at least one representative for another community. Maybe we
would be constraining too much the decision if we follow the advice of the
Executive Committee in selecting a diverse membership, right? By "diverse"
I mean in this particular case, across the different communities within
CIP. So maybe we should be minimalist in this case and write something
along the lines of the Executive Committee selecting diverse membership
across the different communities.
>> JOEL BUTLER: So can I ask a quick question? I don't know how long
you plan for this to run, but I see this as the beginning of a long
discussion, much of which should be done in email, and about a third of our
members are not actually present as well.
>> IAN FISK: Okay.
>> JOEL BUTLER: You should decide how long you want this to go.
>> IAN FISK: Maria, your hand is still up, is that --
>> MARIA ELENA: No, sorry.
>> JOEL BUTLER: Tulika's is up.
>> IAN FISK: My goal was to be done by 3:15. Go ahead.
>> TULIKA BOSE: I guess I would support what Daniel just said, instead
of being very prescriptive in our document, it would be better to leave it
to the committee asking them to ensure that diversity in backgrounds is
part of their selection process or nomination process.
Because there's also the question of people, you know, rotating off,
because, you know, there's a question of terms, how long will the terms be,
and then overlap. And then I think as is currently done for CPAD, and
maybe Petra will talk more about it, they will let DPF know we're looking
for people with these strengths because they are now moving off CPAD, so in
the newer set we select, we're looking for this.
So we might want to have that be the same here.
>> And I guess I am perfectly happy to kick the can down the road. I
guess the one thing I will say is the primary concern of the makeup of this
committee was actually made by one of the experiments as to whether we
had -- like whether the representation between the two experiments was
equal in all possible ways. So in some sense I guess I -- I'm happy to say
the Executive Committee should choose out the membership.
At the same time it does sort of leave open the fact that people will
be upset, maybe people will always be upset. Ruth, you were next.
>> RUTH V.: I mean, I guess I think it depends on what community
you're coming from. I mean, if I was on atlas or CMS, I wouldn't be
particularly concerned that somebody will be a member of atlas or CMS. But
when you know, you start to think about smaller communities but that are
still computing heavy, if you had one theorist and the theorist was
somebody who is exploiting machine learning and AI to like do better, like
BSM things, like that's computing, but that is not necessarily HBC. It's a
totally different beast.
And so I feel like at least, I don't know, at least on the theory
side, I feel like if we're not mildly prescriptive, then there are lots of
directions people could go in, thinking, oh, they're a computing person,
without really thinking through whether they're sort of reflecting like a
broader like computation-heavy community. I don't know.
>> IAN FISK: Peter?
>> PETER BOYLE: I was thinking emphasizing a need to represent smaller
communities, so that we don't simply scale it to the size of the biggest
experiments and they dominate the panel, might make sense, right? Without
necessarily being prescriptive, you have a process whereby if a group
doesn't feel represented, that has to be responded to.
>> IAN FISK: The process would be to tell the Executive Committee to
choose reasonable nominations, as I understand the general direction.
>> PETER BOYLE: And respond if the community is squealing, it has to
be responsive to that.
>> IAN FISK: All right. Maria, last comment.
>> MARIA ELENA: I like that phrasing, we give contrary to DPIF. Those
are still criteria, it's just they're not going to be able to enforce them
literally.
>> IAN FISK: Okay. I think if we gave criteria that said we respect a
reasonable balance between major and small parameters, between theory and
experiments, that would be --
>> PETER BOYLE: And perhaps between different types of theory.
>> IAN FISK: Yes.
>> MARIA ELENA: And across different peers. Obviously we don't write
it here, because I'm not going to make snarky comments, the diversity of
gender, et cetera, et cetera.
>> IAN FISK: Yeah, that was under my blanket, choose members that
encourage and forest a diversity inclusive environment. I put that in too.
That was my umbrella. Okay. I think we should -- I will modify the text
in the document to reflect this discussion. And people should continue to
fix it and make comments in that offline. Does that seem reasonable?
>> JOEL BUTLER: It does, and as I said, I expect a lively discussion.
This is a good beginning, and it indicates it will be lively. So we can
start it in the Google Doc and we can follow it up later on.
>> IAN FISK: For sure.
>> JOEL BUTLER: People can join this effort as your writing team,
right?
>> IAN FISK: Yep.
>> JOEL BUTLER: Great.
>> IAN FISK: Last slide. This meeting was shifted from -- I hesitate
to say normal biweekly schedule because we only had one. But at the same
time, people adjusted their schedules to be available on certain Thursdays
and not others, so I would propose going back to it by meeting next week.
And ideally next week we could have one or two what I would call concept
contributions, so at the level of detail from like the previous slide,
which is designed to foster discussion about communication and partnerships
or technical working groups or career development or DEI activities.
The high level titles in the document. I don't want to do it in real
time, but if people who had volunteered for any of those four could
volunteer to basically make a strong proposal that we could all have a
discussion about at the next meeting, that would be great. If nobody
volunteers, I will be reaching out to you.
One comment I had was in the CPAD charter, there are lots of areas
that are listed as recommendations to the future committee, and people are
encouraged to start from this if they find it helpful. In any case, we
will meet on February 8th, at 3:00 p.m. eastern standard. Any questions on
this?
Any volunteers who want to, in the 30 seconds we have, will say yes, I
would desperately like to make a proposal? Okay. Then think about it and
get back to me.
Maria, I think your hand is still up.
>> MARIA ELENA: I'm so sorry. I'm having tech challenges.
>> IAN FISK: No problem. All right. Petra, would you like to share
your screen?
>> PETRA MERKEL: It says host is sharing.
>> IAN FISK: I am stopping sharing. It looks great.
>> PETRA MERKEL: Okay. Hi, thanks for inviting me. So I'll give you
a little bit -- I'll try to give you a little bit of a history of CPAD,
from my point of view. I was not involved from the beginning, so it's
challenging, maybe. I know you know it stands for coordinating panel for
advanced detectors.
It's a link to the web page here, but if you click on it, it will not
work right now, somehow the page is down. Hopefully it comes back soon. A
little bit on the history. As far as I know, this grew out of the 2012
Snowmass process as instrumentation frontier. The leadership was Ian
Shipsey, Marcel Demarteau. This group of people including Ian and Marcel
pretty much stayed on for seven years. And -- yes, so CPAD is a panel of
APS/DPF, with some bylaws. I'm not exactly sure when they were put into
place. We did recently grow them, in a way, so there were bylaws also
before my turn already.
But before it took over, which I get into on the next slide, but the
bylaws in the beginning did not regulate, for example, the chair line or
how membership is determined or any kind of term limits and so on. But it
did specify some sort of charge, so what CPAD should be doing.
So then in 2020, Karsten Heeger took over as co-chairs. After years
we learned APS does not want co-chairs so we needed to select a chair and
vice chair. One of the first things we did was to modify the bylaws to
actually specify the terms for membership, how long a term is, when you get
selected, how you get selected, who gets selected, and if you can be
reselected, let's say, at least for once.
What we are doing now, to some degree that's reflected in the bylaws,
but it's not completely prescribed in there, is how we select the new
members. So the terms are two years. And you can renew them once. It
could be up to four years, which is what I did now, became of. But we have
now an annual call to the community. And out of the totals with the two
chairs and ten members of the Executive Committee, so a total of 12 people.
And half of them rotate off every year. So we have staggered two-year
terms, basically. And we find the new members among the community, you can
self-nominate or nominate others with a little blurb as the reason, what is
your qualifications for a member of this.
Just to show the bylaws, maybe you've seen them already. So basically
it specifies that you have a chair and a vice chair and ten additional
members. This was recently changed. And these get appointed by the DPF
chair-elect, following a call for nominations. And then the new members,
so the way -- we just went through this for the second time, this
nomination period. And the selection.
And the way we did this is that the CPAD chair that stays on for
another year will make a selection and a proposal of people he would choose
out of the list of nominations and makes this proposal then to the DPF exec
and they basically choose out of those or confirm that list.
And in particular, they would also select who they would recommend as
the vice chair. Of course it should be somebody that they think they can
work well with, that would be an advantage. It's written, so panel members
shall serve staggered, two-year terms but should not serve more than two
consecutive terms. I guess somebody could be reelected later on if there
was a gap.
Then the newly appointed member of the CPAD chair-line shall serve
first as vice chair, succeeding to the chair position in the second year.
If that person gets reelected for a second two-year term, I don't know what
happens, would they go back to vice chair and then chair again? That's not
really specified here.
And then to the charge, the CPAD shall have the responsibility to
promote excellence in the research and development of instrumentation and
detectors to support the national program of particle physics in a global
context through the nomination and selection of the annual DPF
instrumentation awards and the graduate instrumentation research award.
The promotion of educational programs to further the understanding of
detectors and their instrumentation, the organization of multidisciplinary
workshops, and the development of new activities consistent with its
mission.
So that's basically all of it. Again, one more slide on how we get
new members, seeking nominations from the community, as I said. And we do
aim for balance, as you also discussed before. This is not prescribed,
whether we do for balance or multiple dimensions. We strive to have 50-50
more or less lab versus university people, 50-50, roughly, gender. Also
junior and senior, I did not write that here, but we try to cover multiple
career stages.
But then we also need the sort of technical or science experience,
expertise, to try to cover more or less all the major directions in order
to be able to reach out to the community through these people, because
they're often the ones that can contact and reach out to the whole
instrumentation community. And it's good if you have representatives from
all the major areas.
We also in the past tried to include at least one or two international
members, just to link us into the global picture, sort of. It would
sometimes point out things you might forget otherwise. And then we draw a
list from the nominations. But then those who don't get selected for CPAD
themselves, we still keep the list at the back end because these are all
excellent people, and we try to draw from the expertise to help with
committees throughout the year.
Maybe one word I didn't write down here, how do we actually reach the
community and then get these nominations. We have two of the CPAD
workshops over the years, we have actually maintained now an email list of
currently 800 people. So every year after the workshop I basically just
add everybody that was attending the workshop.
And then many of those, it needs some maintenance every time I send an
email to that, which is maybe every couple of months or so, I get a ton of
emails back with people that no longer exist at that email address.
There's a little bit of maintenance that needs to be done. But it's a very
powerful tool, such a large email list, so you should maybe think of how to
do that.
So then now going into a little bit of contents of the charge of what
we do throughout the year. One is the GIRA awards, graduate
instrumentation research award. It got established in 2018. We select
about one to two students per year for two-year periods to carry out their
own R&D projects.
This is funded by the DOE, program manager for technical
instrumentation. It's currently a $45,000 stipend and $25,000 more in
tuition. This is the first year, the second year even the same amount on
top of that. So what CPAD does -- CPAD doesn't have any funding. The
funding comes from the DOE in this case.
What we do, though, at CPAD is we form the GIRA selection committee
every year, appoint one chair, the vice chair, and the next year the vice
chair will become the chair. So there is a little bit of continuity in
experience doing this. And then there are about four to five other
members, it's not exactly prescribed. Members do not need to be members of
the CPAD Executive Committee. So again, they're drawn from the community
and could be part of this list of nomination that we receive.
The term is only one year, except for the chair, who was vice chair,
not chair, for two years. Nominations are collected, it's currently
maintained by Bob Bernstein, for many years, I think. This is not ideal,
because we have to bug him, so far it works. And the GIRA committee makes
a selection, and that is then approved, vetted only by the CPAD exec and
then put forward to the DOE program manager.
Currently we are moving the funds to me at Fermilab and I write a
contract, statement of work for the university. This is far from ideal but
it seems the most convenient way to move money to a random university.
Then we provide assistance for this SBIR program, small business industry
research program where we try to industrialize certain detector
technologies, small companies.
This is not really CPAD. But since we have a good group of technical
experts together, this traditionally has been used as a source for Helmut
for technical experts. We provide experts on various technologies to him.
It's a very constant thing, once you're on this list, you pretty much do
this for several years in a row.
It's mostly really organized by Helmut. So it's a little bit aided
only by CPAD. And we help him assigning proposals to reviewers in the
community. All right. And then the next big thing is the DPF
instrumentation award. This was established in 2015, still under Ian and
Marcel. And we edit an early career edition in 2018. So what CPAD does
here is we form the selection committee.
Again, it doesn't have to be part of the execs, it can be just people
from the community. One chair, the vice chair becomes the chair the next
year, about four other members. They stay on for two years, though, for
continuity, except we also appoint last year's winners as part of the
committee.
The duty then, once they win, they have to have the duty to stay on
for one year as members. I forgot to write, the CPAD, this committee
actually has half the members appointed by CPAD and half the members
appointed by DPF, which is not completely clear what that means, to me, if
as the DPF-appointed person you actually need to be a DPF member. I don't
think so.
But they get vetted by the DPF exec, and the CPAD one gets vetted by
the CPAD committee. That's the main difference. Also for this award we
call for nominations to AJO, and then selection is approved by us and then
the main, the final selection is DPF exec. So you can see there's a very
close coloration really between us and the DPF chair line. Throughout the
year. In the past we had done something, we would report in a meeting for
five minutes or so. I think that could be useful.
And then our main thing really is what we do every year, the annual
CPAD workshop, that's been going on on since the beginning, 2013, I
believe. So now, since a couple of years, we have actually official call
at the end of the year to volunteer, either university or lab, to host the
next workshop, next year, which is usually in the fall.
Then they create a local organizing committee, together with the CPAD
exec, we then organize the workshop. This has grown significantly in
recent years. I've been going there since 2015 or so, there's maybe 100,
120 people. The last one, in November 2023, had 270 people in-person. It
was 250 in-person or so.
There's a reason for that, probably due to the special performer last
time. There's clearly increased interest in the community including in
Europe and in Asia. And that has really started during the pandemic when
we had a fully virtual workshop. But it's very good to see CPAD really
having this impact because historically you have large instrumentation
conferences throughout the year that happen every two or three years, and
that are worldwide pretty much, and CPAD really started out as this
national workshop to bring the community together.
And that has really grown into sort of internationally-recognized
instrumentation workshop of significance. So that was great, great
success, I think. And we have some opening and closing plenary sessions
that reflect on the overall field. And then we have a lot of parallels
with the technical talks and the various technology areas.
We do have some dedicated plenary session and award plenary where we
invite talks by the GIRA award winners and the DPF instrumentation award
winners, which is very nice, because they really give their talks and get
the awards, the community really understands their work.
And then we also have since a few years an early career plenary. This
started, again, during Covid. It was an attempt to give some virtual
networking opportunity to our other career colleagues which was really
lacking during Covid, obviously, when nobody met in person. Even after
Covid, we kept this in place because it's nice to select some early career
community members that have a chance to really stand out at a large
workshop like this and present the work in front of a plenary audience of
200 or so people.
We typically organize a town haul discussion with summary sessions,
it's the networking event of the year for people working on this. We have
organized some other kind of workshops throughout the year. So one was by
Ian and Marcel, this QIS workshop at Argon in 2017. This was really the
kickoff for the whole QIS. It all started with that workshop, as far as I
can tell. There was a workshop report, I tried to link it here, but since
the website is down, I couldn't. But you can find it from the website.
There's also a workshop report from one of the earlier CPAD workshops
which is very comprehensive and lays out a roadmap for the whole field.
There was a multidisciplinary workshop, but that was more Snowmass related,
all sort of the same people organizing this.
And then coming to the latest point, so this is something that came
out of the latest Snowmass, 2/13/22. That's the these R&D colorations.
That was a recommendation of the Snowmass instrumentation frontier,
recognizing there is a need for coordinated R&D effort within the U.S.,
because we have so many institutions, we need collaborations to work
together to pursue a roadmap for R&D, including milestones and timelines
and so on.
And pulling together to really come up with common funding proposals
that we submit. And of course that's with a goal to collaborate with our
European partners, at least, for these CERN DRDs. These were established
at the last CPAD workshop in November last year which I believe is the
reason that we saw such a large increase in participation.
Everybody wanted to be there when this got kicked off. And several of
we call them RDCs have been established with two to three conveners each,
they all have been selected by the CPAD exec. The groups have been
meeting, the kickoff at the last workshop. Since then, we've been
formulating road maps, work packages, R&D goals and milestones. Again, we
don't have any funding. The aim is to collaborate like this in order to
make it more likely to actually get funding for this.
If we can show that we collaborate, we work together, we try to
minimize duplication in our efforts, so it's a streamlined effort that
follows a certain roadmap with previously identified goals and so on, I
think it will be easier, and Helmut agrees, the program manager, it will be
easier to get funding for activities.
Right now, I mean, the goal to prepare a few funding proposals, it's
expected in late summer. Probably the CPAD exec will help organize and
prioritize these proposals before they go to the program manager. And that
is really -- this is a grassroots effort that has just now started, end of
last year, with CPAD. That was one of the major activities, I think, we
started in recent years.
As you can see, since Karsten and I took over, Karsten stayed on three
years, Jonathan from Texas took over from him and I stayed on for
continuity but now my term finished last year so I'm done for four years.
The last four years, I would say it's become a lot more formal, both in the
bylaws and also in the way we handle the outreach to the community, turning
over membership and it seems to be a much more democratic process now,
that's a good thing. That's all I had to say. I don't know if you have
questions.
>> Thanks, Petra, that was very useful. Charles?
>> CHARLES LEGGETT: You could have gone first, Ian. Okay. Since I
have the mic. I have a few questions. If I understand correctly, it was
the CPAD chair specifically who made selections from the pool of nominees
and then the DPF committee would choose that person or from whatever
nominees the chair selected, so it would be one person selecting?
>> PETRA MERKEL: Right. So we only did this twice so far. Two years
ago I was basically the chair that stayed on. And I had ten members of the
Executive Committee. Five were continuing. I had to find five new ones
and a new vice chair. All of these nominations, which was maybe 20, 30
people, I made a selection, the top list of, say, so I needed six people, I
was looking at what are the -- what's the technical expertise we're losing
as the outgoing members, what's the general balance, the lab/university
balance.
I tried to replace that basically with these new six members. It's
not always possible to go in so many dimensions, just six people, you don't
find six people that cover all those things in a perfect way. But as close
as I could get.
I sent that list to probably Joel as the DPF chair. Either they would
agree with that or say, this one person, can you find somebody else. They
would say the whole list of the nominees. So they could say let's go for
this other person.
>> CHARLES LEGGETT: Was there any discussion within the existing CPAD
committee about who was going to be nominated or replaced?
>> PETRA MERKEL: No.
>> CHARLES LEGGETT: Was it handled this way for the very first group
as well, when whoever was originally appointed the chairperson made the
selections?
>> PETRA MERKEL: I don't know how they made the selections, I don't
know if anybody remembers. As I said, it start grew out of Snowmass.
Probably, yes, through Snowmass, they probably collated toying in a group.
>> CHARLES LEGGETT: Was there overlap with the GIRA and DPF awards,
those committees and the people on the CPAD committee?
>> PETRA MERKEL: The DPF and GIRA, they have nothing to do with each
other.
>> CHARLES LEGGETT: But was there overlap.
>> PETRA MERKEL: Yes, once in a while, there would be a person who
served on one of those award committees.
>> CHARLES LEGGETT: So there was nothing to specific forbid that.
It's all academics.
>> IAN FISK: Charles, was that it?
>> CHARLES LEGGETT: That's it.
>> IAN FISK: Okay.
>> I have a question about your interactions with DUE. You
specifically mentioned Helmut. Can you clarify how -- like these
interactions with DUE and what about the other program managers and do you
have some corresponding person in NSF?
>> PETRA MERKEL: So for a while I tried to reach out and talk every
three months or so to the program managers, just a quick check-in,
reporting what we're up to. And they would tell us, maybe if there's a
warning, a PRN or something. I did that maybe twice, it didn't work very
well, but actually regularly. But I would recommend doing that.
So I'm also the detector coordinator at Fermilab, the largest program
nationwide of this sort. So I already had a good standing relationship
with Helmut as my program manager. We exchanged emails, he called me just
last night, for example, to talk about something. That happened anyway.
So maybe it's just me personally that that worked with. I don't know.
It's hard for me to judge.
But that's definitely a good thing to talk to them regularly. With
the NSF it was a little more challenging. So we did invite once in a while
Jim Schtanck as the Representative, I think it's somebody else now. We had
two or three of these sort of specific meetings with them, together, DOE
and NSF, just a half an hour, every few months.
We did always invite them for the workshop, the annual workshop. The
town hall, Helmut always comes, it's a little bit hit or miss. I also
didn't write it down, we did get some funding from them for the workshop
organization, like 10K or so. And the last -- not this last one but the
two before that were actually at Stony Brook, because we wanted the synergy
with the electron ion collider happening there and the synergy with the
nuclear physics community, looking for that, specifically for detectors, of
course. But it was very timely, in a way. And there NSF was very much
interested as well as DOE nuclear physics, we suddenly had funding from all
sorts of directions.
>> Do they have a specific Helmut equivalent?
>> PETRA MERKEL: Nuclear physics? No, they don't.
>> Okay, thanks.
>> IAN FISK: Joel?
>> JOEL BUTLER: I just wanted to say that what Petra showed, of
course, is something that evolved. So all of the formal relations with DOE
and NSF were things that CPAD kind of earned over the years, right? I
mean, there was no -- I mean, these are things that are a success of CPAD
that they managed to get the agency's confidence, that they managed to get
the agency to make some investments in their program, because the agency
saw that they delivered value to the agencies as part of their regular
activities.
So I know that the early bylaws did not have all of the stuff in it
that the current bylaws have, because some of the programs didn't actually
exist. Also the method, certainly the number of people on the CPAD panel
has changed over time, and is changing now, I think, again, or has just
changed.
So you have to remember that when you look at Petra's slides. These
are, for us, sort of aspirational goals. We would like, a few years down
the road, to be able to say many of the things she said, translated to the
software and computing, you know, situation. And I just wanted to -- I
hope she'll confirm that, and I think I just wanted to make that clear.
Do you have any comment, Petra?
>> PETRA MERKEL: No, I agree. As I said, I wasn't really involved
early on, I was more, as a member, going to the workshops, but not in the
steering group, really. It was really this one large-ish group edit by Ian
and Marcel that existed over seven or eight years, mostly unchanged,
actually, in the membership. It was always the same people doing
everything. And actually from the outside, it felt kind of daunting and
hard to understand how you could crack into that.
I prefer much more what we have developed in the meantime, the last
four years ago, this rotating membership that is limited in two to
four-year terms. I think it will get a much broader participation and
buy-in also from the community.
>> JOEL BUTLER: So let me just comment that as Jeremy attended a lot
of the activities and is aware this, and was impressed by what he saw, and
has expressed an interest in this from the start, that's good. Our little
exploratory committee, whose members, at least two of them, are here, met
with him and had a very nice meeting with him.
And he told us many things about how such a group interacts with the
agencies, which is not direct. I mean, if you have a program, it's direct.
For example, if they're looking for directions or other things, you know,
we go through a complicated route with informing HEPAP, and having them
include our remarks to HEPAP in their minutes, something that they can say
in the agency.
So we have a lot to learn, and a lot to earn. But I think that's
something that you need to think about. And then NSF, I tried to reach out
to what I thought is corresponding person during this period, I think his
name is Bogdan Mehala, I'm sure some of you know him well, but we were
unable to get in touch with him even by using the agency of people we know
in NSF EPP.
So that's some work that will have to be done by the committee. There
are other things in Petra's presentation which are totally within the
purview of the committee, like running a workshop. That you can do. So
I'm talking about things you might or might not put in the bylaws just
referencing the kind of things, awards you can work out. You can maybe get
DPF to acknowledge them and maybe even provide some support, which I think
is proof for some of the limited financial aspects that are part of those
awards.
Is travel part of that, Petra?
>> PETRA MERKEL: No. So there's no money, no. In fact we really have
no money. A few years ago, we created this web page because we did not
want to be linked off the Fermilab pages forever, we wanted to at least
appear more independent. We bought our own domain, which is $150 a year,
somebody has to pay that, so far it was just one of the chairs that had the
department money that pays for making these plaques for the instrumentation
award winners, all of that is paid out of pocket by ourselves.
So one thing is, silly little things, like the web page, the email
lists, that's all at the listserv at Fermilab. The AJO for the
nominations, we need Bob's help. None that have is really ideal, I kind of
muddled through, over the years, making it work.
>> IAN FISK: Tulika?
>> TULIKA BOSE: I just wanted to say, with respect to DPF, certainly
some things could be moved to DPF or rather APS, but not all. For example,
Petra, this question of the emails, you have the flexibility of sending
emails whenever you want to CPAD, because you have your own mailing list.
If you change this to an APS thing, it's a whole process.
>> PETRA MERKEL: No, the mailing is fine, it's tedious to maintain,
but it's very powerful.
>> TULIKA BOSE: The one thing DPF is currently paying is what
Bernstein maintains. But right now the CPAD awards are the only thing that
are going through that AJO. So in the near future, we might be actually
moving everything to APS, an APS system that handles APS fellows and other
awards. And this way it is more integrated and not paid for separately.
>> IAN FISK: Petra, my question, I think, I was trying to figure out
how things like this GIRA award were established, because it seems like
that would require the agency to propose it, because -- and then to trust
the committee to actually award it. And so I was wondering if that was
something, when those started on the lifetime of CPAD.
>> PETRA MERKEL: So this was in 2018. The DPF was 2015. I think it
was the -- again, I was not directly involved, but I think it was the CPAD
committee that saw the need for such a thing, because one of our mandates
is also the fostering of the next generation, right, training and so on.
And so they saw the need for this kind of award, trying to attract students
to do -- to detect R&D.
And I assume they just talked to Helmut and he agreed this would be
good. And he carved out this $100,000 a year funding, actually it's more
than that because with two students every year now, they stay on for two
years, they have four awards at any given moment. He's just carving out
the money from the program. We are very lucky, Helmut is a super
reasonable guy. He wants what's best for the field.
>> IAN FISK: It seemed like a number of things hinged on a strong
relationship with the program manager.
>> PETRA MERKEL: Yes.
>> JOEL BUTLER: Mm-hmm.
>> PETRA MERKEL: Especially this one. I mean, the DPF one, that has
nothing to do with this, there's no money involved, it's really for
recognition, for career and instrumentation.
>> IAN FISK: Peter.
>> One thing we need to recognize, Helmut would just do something like
what was just described, and the NSF at least nominally being proposal
driven, so the sort of nature of this kind of entity has a sort of a
different expectation relative to the two different funding agencies. As
an aside, after our last meeting, I did talk to him and mentioned again
that this was happening.
So, again, it's on his radar. But again, the agencies are different.
>> PETRA MERKEL: Jeremy, if you managed to talk to him, you could
suggest him to talk to Helmut, maybe, get his perspective on this.
>> IAN FISK: Are there other questions for Petra? If not -- Liz, go
ahead.
>> LIZ SEXTON-KENNEDY: I was calling to ask about -- regarding the
workshops, you know, in the computing world, we have workshops and
conferences. We have like the chip conference that's been going on for
decades and then ACET interleaves. We also have recently had these joint
computing and software represented by the international HSF and
international WLCG.
And I was wondering if, before you started your workshops, did you
have equivalent things you had to compete against or was it really your
workshops were the first time that the whole community, international and
other, are getting together?
>> PETRA MERKEL: No, as I mentioned before, I mean, there are
instrumentation workshops, international, that happen every two, three
years.
>> LIZ SEXTON-KENNEDY: Two, three years, okay.
>> PETRA MERKEL: Usually. The big ones, the IEEE workshops, TIP, the
PISA meeting and so on. They're really international, often most senior
people of the community only go. I think with the CPAD one, this was
really a very intimate, small venue, where a lot of students and post-docs
were encouraged to attend. It was really very U.S.-centric in the
beginning, this has broadened out a bit over the last few years.
I think one important aspect, also, there are no proceedings, although
of course there's an advantage to having proceedings, especially for the
young people, they get single author papers, sort of. But it makes it much
less formal, it's really informal, you have people showing up with crazy
ideas.
Once we had a session, a plenary, like blue sky ideas. People would
come, like an elevator pitch, five minutes, describing their idea of what
one could maybe pursue. And those were extremely stimulating, especially
for the young people, to see, whoa, people are thinking, actually, positive
things.
And -- yeah, it's --
>> LIZ SEXTON-KENNEDY: It sounds like there wasn't a calendar
competition for getting the same group of people together so much.
>> PETRA MERKEL: Not really, no.
>> LIZ SEXTON-KENNEDY: Because you were aiming at a younger audience,
and a different format and things like that.
>> PETRA MERKEL: Also it's just a handful, you can try to avoid them
for the year. The last year, we managed to overlay it with an IEEE
conference, which was not ideal.
>> LIZ SEXTON-KENNEDY: Okay.
>> PETRA MERKEL: But I don't really know. The two workshops that go
with a survey afterwards to see what people liked most, and so there was a
lot of really positive feedback. We just tried to keep enforcing those
aspects.
>> LIZ SEXTON-KENNEDY: Okay. Thanks.
>> PETRA MERKEL: Better and better every year, I think.
>> IAN FISK: Joel.
>> JOEL BUTLER: So I mentioned that we had had a conversation with
Jeremy Love, and -- who, you know, is the program manager, I think, for
computing, at least in our part of the OE. And he was of the opinion that
what would be very useful for him would be -- and he was thinking in a very
broad term, not just ETP, that we were very siloed and even our workshops
in some sense were siloed, just more comprehensive, larger silo.
He thought if we brought the community together and discussed common
problems, that would be very valuable. So we ought to think about that
when we write our document, and say what communities we might want to reach
out to that are not conventionally part of what we do, how we reach out to
industry, which I think is in the charge that we wrote to this group.
And that makes it perhaps a little different than the instrumentation.
But his point was that he feels that there are a lot of commonalities that
are missed, because people really don't talk to each other, even though we
do talk in fairly big communities.
CHEP embraces a big community but it's not really all-inclusive. So
he would be very interested, I think, if we tried to carve that role out.
That's little bit different than maybe you imagined. But it was something
that came across for him. And, you know, you can imagine that in his
position, anything that he does, he immediately gets asked, well, you know,
isn't somebody else doing that, why aren't you doing that with this person,
why don't you include that group.
So I think that's something we should, you know, think about. I
mentioned this because we talk about representation and maybe our
representation has to be a little broader.
>> PETRA MERKEL: We definitely have the same issue. Even at the
workshop we have all these parallel sessions, we try to put things sort of
in relationship with each other, so we can exchange in relevant is areas.
Some of the workshops we tried to make topical, the ones at Stony Brook, we
had strong overlap with the physics community because of the EIC.
We had this QIS workshop. We had this multidisciplinary workshop
where we really tried to bring also material scientists and so on. Really,
people where we think we can, as with the instrumentation community,
benefit from. So we do try to do that. We probably could do a better job.
For that, these workshops would be very good.
>> IAN FISK: Other questions? If not, we're sort of at the top of the
hour. We had one bit of extra business, which was, we wanted -- Peter, we
want to float the idea of a potential face-to-face meeting sort of at the
end of the process. Peter, would you like to summarize?
>> Thank you, it was connected with something that was mentioned in
this last topic, which is that we have, from the Institute, we have run
these coordinated system workshops where we've brought people together
across the experiments, at some level across the domains, to talk about the
R&D that's going on. And so we were looking, we've done that a few times
over the past five or six years, and we were looking at opportunities to do
that.
And it occurred to me that that's a funded activity, right, that we
could potentially, since this thing is looking at a time scale of four
months, we could start looking at the DPF meeting essentially as a possible
place to have a session for the coordinated ecosystem thing, the Sunday
before, or after. It occurred to me, this thing, the time scale is in
principle four months, right, which takes us to DPF, which maybe says
that's the time scale we should be consolidating a report out, sort of an
in-person workshop at DPF or just before or after could make sense.
And, you know, the extent that it's at all synergistic with this
coordinated ecosystem workshop, maybe we can make it all work together
synergistically. So that's the thought.
>> MARIA ELENA: Peter, when and where are we looking? Sorry, I don't
have the dates off the top of my head.
>> The DPF meeting is joint with the workshop, the DPF meeting is the
13th to the 17th of May in Pittsburgh, I think it's sort of co-organized
between CMU and [indiscernible].
>> JOEL BUTLER: Right, so this is DPF, we're calling it DPF '24. It's
our annual DPF meeting which we hold every year and a half. And the -- I
think this is actually a real opportunity, because we can explain what
we're doing. I mean, first of all, we can meet together, that's one
advantage, right, Peter, that you had in mind?
>> Yes.
>> JOEL BUTLER: And second, we could use the opportunity, for example,
to explain what we're doing to DPF. We'll have some broad participation by
the DPF community, and it will certainly get everybody's attention, even if
they don't come. And I think that it would be an opportunity to explain
ourselves to them.
And then if you have a broader community nearby that you're including
in your workshop, we could also talk to them. So I think it could be a
very good event for us. Did I understand your intentions, Peter, in this?
>> Yep, 100%.
>> JOEL BUTLER: Now, it might be logistically a little messy. But let
me know tell you, it can't be a large incremental increase to the messiness
of this conference, which is a marriage of two fairly dissimilar things.
And I think our host in particular is up to it, he's pretty impressive as
an organizer. Thank you.
>> IAN FISK: Liz?
>> LIZ SEXTON-KENNEDY: Yeah, I just wanted to mention that that
particular week also coincides with the HSF WLCG workshop. So that would
be an unfortunate overlap. But just, you know, thought I would mention
that.
>> JOEL BUTLER: Okay. But this is -- yeah, okay. So this is the few
days before the DPF meeting, is that what we're talking about?
>> No, it's completely coincident, that week is the HSF WLCG meeting,
unfortunately it's --
>> LIZ SEXTON-KENNEDY: Not even on the same continent.
>> So it's not perfect for getting some sets of software computing
people to DPF. I will be coming to DPF. I don't know about the rest of
you, which of you plan to go to which meetings.
>> IAN FISK: Yeah, we also have to -- there's not an agenda yet with a
layout of the days and the various things either. So we'll have to -- I
guess in the interests of time, why don't we -- this seems like an
interesting idea. We can see, maybe over email we can have a little bit of
a survey as to who would be able to attend, as the first thing we do.
And that may also be dictated a little bit by what the schedule of
WGHSF is. I'm not sure we're going to get a final answer today.
>> Otherwise, just to be clear, otherwise, the other possibility could
be, again, because we kind of have some funding from [indiscernible]
ecosystem, we could overlay something, either just before or just after,
which would allow people to come back from DPF. Anyway, we can look at
sort of alternate possibilities around that.
>> IAN FISK: Right, it seems like a good idea if we can figure out how
to schedule it. Great. Other business for today? If not, I would
encourage everyone to contribute to the document. I'll be reaching out to
some of you to see if we can get small micropresentations at the next
meeting, which will be February 8th at 3:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time.
See you all then.
>> JOEL BUTLER: Okay, great.
>> CHARLES LEGGETT: Bye, everybody.