This is being provided in a rough-draft format. Live captioning, or Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART), is provided by a human stenographer in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. There may be mistakes or untranslates due to inaudibility or the rapid speech pattern of the speaker.
March 21, 2024.
American Physical Society Task Force Plenary.
...
>> IAN: Okay. All right. It's been uploaded. All right.
>> MATTHEW: Thank you, Ian.
>> IAN: Shall we get started?
All right. I'm going to share my screen. Can people still hear me?
>> Yes.
>> IAN: Great. So let's see. Today we have three items to discuss.
The first one was we agreed to have a discussion, and hopefully the last significant discussion about committee makeup and membership. And then I wanted to review where we are with the document, and then decide on a face to face meeting, which I believe is May 13. So let's start -- that part.
So the committee makeup, one high-level question we want to make, which is how prescriptive do we want to be.
And are there attributes that we would like to be prescriptive about, but are there other attributes that we want to give as input but don't want to specify how to implement them, in terms of ratios or numbers of people, things that we think that the next people who make the committee should be thinking about.
And then the final thing was a little bit more abstract, was: How do we qualify the common activities of the committee so that people recognize that their interests can be represented by people who are in different situations?
By saying this, we need to keep in mind when we talk about the committee makeup, many of the things the committee does in terms of DEI or career development span a lot of different kinds of actual day-to-day activities, whether that's theory versus experiment, or big or small experiment, and there are some things where having people -- there are things like career development, where having good representation from people at various times of their careers is probably very important.
And maybe more important, for instance, than the makeup of the kinds of -- of professional activities that they do, just because the concerns that people have and the things that people -- we think that should -- concert on, may be different depending where you are in your career, in ways that are more significant than what experiment you're working on at the time.
And I guess what I wanted to start with, an open discussion about sort of how prescriptive we would like to be, and then if we want to be prescriptive, which -- attributes, and what they should be listed as.
And I can bring up the current text of the document.
As where -- let's make this big enough --
But ... let's see.
[Muttering].
Okay.
Is this readable?
>> No.
>> MATTHEW: No, it's a bit small.
>> IAN: Yeah. Well ...
>> If you mouse over the document, there's a plus sign. Plus, minus, zoom. Maybe it's on the other pane. Where it says recompile, maybe it's over there. Right.
And then -- there you go.
>> IAN: Oh, okay. All right. Let's try that.
Okay.
Readable now?
>> JOEL: Yes.
>> IAN: Okay.
So can we -- as a committee, can we agree that the size of the committee of 15, and three-year appointments, are things that we agree to? Anyone feels strongly, please speak now.
>> JOAN: So I think it shouldn't be much bigger than that. It could be a little bit bigger, and it could be a little ... it could be left to be defined. But I don't think it can be bigger than 20. I think 15 is highly desirable, just because it'll be hard to get people together. You can -- you can have a committee of 20, and 15 make it, it'll be a slightly different composition each week. That's not ideal.
Better if you could get a committee that everybody can make it. It has to be pretty compact. And that of course creates a challenge when you try to worry about whether you're representing large array of communities. That's our dilemma, I guess.
>> IAN: Maria, you had your hand up?
>> I was wondering how many people were a part of CPAD.
>> IAN: It started out smaller, but if you look at the website, they have the primary committee and subcommittees. The core is about that size, about 12-ish or so, I thought. But they have some committees and things that extend into ...
>> Maria: The reason I ask, we had this economy within DPF for ethics and, you know, there's a much for controversial things to talk about than computing. But it was -- I think it was nine people.
>> JOEL: Right. So what I wanted to say, though, Ian, is that at some point, in an early meeting, we -- I thought without necessarily seeing the connection to this kind of -- said we would not have standing committees, except possibly for a few -- one or two very specific ones that were not really top, you know, computing topical. There was a talk about an ethics economy, or something like that. But we agreed that we wouldn't have subgroups.
Maybe that's the way out. I think we should think about that and think whether they were -- we were hasty in reaching that conclusion.
>> Oh, thank you. You have it as well. And they award the committees, which are separate. Yeah.
>> JOEL: Those are separate things.
>> IAN: And our advisory program is separate, so yeah. The core committee is 12.
10 + 2.
>> That sounds big to me, personally, but I don't want to monopolize this conversation.
>> JOEL: Well, okay.
So I -- I remembered something. I thought this might have been circulated in an early stage, but I'm not sure anymore.
The DPF, when they putting together the charge, tried to make a list of stakeholders.
And that started with the little subcommittee that we had, but it also was put in front of the executive committee. So that's another dozen people who looked it over and expanded it.
And, you know, if you look at who we're trying to communicate with or contact or work with or influence or be influenced by, it's a huge number of stakeholders. We call them that, for lack of any better name.
And so I abstracted that from an early communication from DPF, from within DPF. I don't know if you guys have ever seen it. I put it on the -- on the indigo at Ian's suggestion, and I think we want to be careful with this, because we don't want to get into a discussion about whether this is a good list or a bad list.
What we want to say is whether the size is anywhere near this size of the list, because if it is, it frames or problem.
>> IAN: So I -- I shared my screen with the list.
And the reason why I thought it was a useful to show the list, basically what you see is the big experiments are these and the smaller experiments are this pile, and there's theory, and, like, various kinds of computing, and various partnerships.
And I don't want to discuss whether it's a comprehensive list, but I think it does sort of show the scale of the problem.
And I'm wondering a little bit, as comparison to CPAD, I don't get -- maybe -- I don't get the impression, for instance, that there's, like, a theoretical detector-builder -- we have -- there's a larger scope in software computing in terms of the places that it touches, rather than in the advanced detector committee. And I think we can justify -- it will be larger, but I think we could -- I think we almost have to justify a somewhat larger committee, just because we have a larger -- a larger set of people to interact with.
>> CHARLES: I think this goes back to the third point you were making in your introduction.
The specific stakeholders, I don't think they're necessarily germane to this discussion.
Because the needs of, say, atlas and CMS are not different. We want to be able to represent the needs of the community, as opposed to the names behind the specific experiments and such that they're attached to.
And it's like something that's kind of a fog in all this. What is the need of a large experiment, and how does that differ from that of the small experiment? And those are the type of representations that we actually want to find.
>> IAN: Agreed. Maria, you were first.
>> MARIA: I asked, Ian, can you add to the Google doc a list of these task forces? I still don't know. There are 15 people here. The first email had over twenty. I don't know how big this task force is, and who's on it, who's the ex-officio, who are the observers, and that was a pretty good idea of what size is a good size, and what size is too big.
>> IAN: Okay. There were -- twenty --
>> MARIA: Can you please put the list? I've asked more than once. Can I don't know who I'm working with, and that's very -- what's the word -- unsettling to me.
>> IAN: Okay.
>> JOEL: Okay.
>> IAN: The first email list, there was a list of people, and the CC'd were listed as observers, but I will send it on a Google doc. Jan, you're next.
>> Thanks. So the needs of the experiment may be important -- may be overlapping. I think there's going to be some politics, though, because you also want to promote technical solutions.
And we should make sure it doesn't become a shootout, but this is, to some degree -- I don't know how to avoid it.
If Atlas has a solution to a problem, you know, then I want to -- they do want to make sure that the names attached to that solution get the right recognition.
Of course, that is kind of competing.
I don't know how to resolve that, but that's a dimension we need to take into account, not just the needs.
>> IAN: So -- let's see. Going through sort of the list of, like -- the various things that are here that are listed as activities of the committee, like communications and partnerships, facilitate working groups and workshops, Lesson interactions and -- especially things like technical working groups.
It seems like there's a lot of overlap in terms of, like -- the technical workshops, interaction with industry, are probably -- they span multiple activities. And I can imagine, for instance, that if a difference between a large and a small experiment, a small experiment might need to benefit more from, say, training, because they don't have as large -- a set of expertise. And so having someone from a small experiment to make sure that the needs for training and exposure to technology, that would naturally happen in a larger experiment because there are more people, are being met. But some of these things, I think, are -- career development, the needs of someone working and computing on the theory side and the experiment side in terms of being recognized for the value of their contribution, are probably pretty similar.
And so I guess what I'm wondering, is if -- if we proposed a list of -- if we said the membership should be between 15 and 20 people, and then said that these are the -- if there were a set of attributes that we thought were particularly important to people, can remember, and another set that we thought should be balanced out over the committee, whether we can end up with something that was sort of more reasonable. Maria.
>> MARIA: I'm looking at the list. There were two different messages that you sent out. And it was between 16 the first time, 18 the first time, about a third of the people never showed to any of our meetings.
And I'm concerned that we are not going to be able to sit a committee with 15 to 20 people.
Because, you know, finding the participants for this was already hard, and getting them to show up was already hard.
So maybe one proposal will be to say ten? Or twelve? So that we can sit it at least once.
And then the committee itself can expand, with concurrence from the PF.
>> IAN: Please -- people should express an opinion. Ruth.
>> RUTH: So I don't know if I -- I mean, I understand the concern of having it be too large and unwieldy. I was on the same nine-person committee with Maria.
I think that was more controversial. I also understand that there is, like, political aspects.
I guess I just wanted to say I do think there are issues unique to, like, career development in theory and more, like, career progression in theory, that are potentially different than those in experiment.
>> IAN: Okay.
>> RUTH: But again, that's not a quantitative statement about how many should be there. You know what I'm trying to say.
>> IAN: Sure.
>> RUTH: I guess my question is, are we assuming that this committee itself is not going to do any sort of, like, solving computational, computing issues? It's more going to, like, delegate those to, like, other groups and committees? So that --
>> IAN: I --
>> RUTH: I guess that makes a difference in terms of what kind of representation is needed.
>> IAN: Okay. That's an interesting question. I have been operating under the assumption that this committee's primary responsibility is to make an environment to facilitate the kind of changes that -- or the kind of evolution in the community that people were hoping for. Or people thought were needed. And those were -- and specifically in the areas of training and development, there's some areas of technology evolution, but I've been sort of imagining that the committee sets the environment for those in terms of whether those are short-term task force workshops to expose technology to the field.
In the absence of a budget, there's not a lot of -- I think there's not a lot of technical solutions that this committee can develop.
This is -- this is a ... it's a coordination panel, I think.
>> RUTH: Yeah, I guess I was sort of thinking facilitating more interactions between people nominally in different fields, you know. To allow them to make headway by working together.
And the point is, there, you can imagine needing specific, like, people from specific --
>> IAN: Right. Connections into various communities.
>> RUTH: Yeah. So if that's not the goal here, I mean just trying to --
>> IAN: I think the workshop goal is definitely still an important part.
Steve.
>> STEVE: So to answer Ruth's question, I would think the many idea is planning. And certainly since snow mass 2013 when I was, you know, cochair of the frontier, we felt that there needed to be more constant attention to the issues than comes up in snow mass every, you know, five to eight years or so.
And that would be a good thing, to have a -- this committee that would be able to raise issues, that the funding agencies, for instance, needed to know about.
As far as the composition of the committee, I think 15 is a good number. With three-year terms, that means five people would be coming on each year. And I would suggest of those five people, three be experimentalists and two be theorists.
>> IAN: Okay. Charles.
>> CHARLES: I'm in favor of having a larger group as opposed to a smaller one, because I know people in general, you know, not everybody shows up at these meetings and it's harder to make progress when three out of ten show up, as opposed to 10 out of 20. You get a better exchange of ideas when there's a larger number. And with a group size of 20, I don't think 20 people will ever show up to these meetings. I don't think they will become unwieldy.
The other thing that might be an idea, to have, you know, have an explicit reevaluation of the makeup of the group after, you know, a year or two years or something, with input from both the committee and the community to see if there are any parts of the community which are not being adequately represented. I think it's hard from the start to determine what the exact best makeup should be. And you know we should feel our way through it. I think that would probably be a good way to try to converge on an optimal solution.
>> IAN: Agree, though it's sometimes hard to figure out who's not being represented if they're not being represented.
>> CHARLES: Hopefully if they're not being represented, they'll say something.
>> PETER: I think -- sorry --
>> IAN: Go ahead, Peter.
>> PETER: I like the fact that we're going back to the constituents identified as partners in the mass process.
I think that the align -- different areas of different technical requirements, some of them are quite similar to each other. So it's not simply a -- a trivial you know mapping to the snow mast frontiers. There was a real exercise to identify the -- the different technical areas, which one of the reasons there's been quite a lot of push from the HPC-heavy calculational theory elements, and, you know, which includes the accelerator designs as well, cosmology and high energy theory.
I think that, you know, having the list of areas, and having a charge for the committee, the formation -- whoever is deciding the -- the exact panel in the end, they have to have appropriately diverse representation of a list -- a named list of constituencies means that any constituencies that feel they are not properly represented can go back and say, "Hey, we need another panel member because we're being overlooked here," or whatever.
>> IAN: Joel?
>> JOEL: Okay. So I think what I'm going to say is going to be a little bit idealistic. Which I wouldn't say is a characteristic of mine.
But I think that what you're looking for in a committee that's supposed to represent a lot of different constituencies, or at least communicate with a lot of different constituencies and facilitate their progress, I think you have to have people who essentially themselves are plugged into computing in a very broad way. That they -- they take a very broad set. They have a very broad set of interactions in the community.
So for example, there are plenty of atlas CMS people, people from smaller experiments, that are really plugged into the community in a lot of ways.
They may be interested in specific technologies. They may be working with theorists on, oh, you know, generators or things like that.
They may be aware of machine learning techniques.
They may be covering three or four different things in their own work, and their interest may even branch out from that.
I think if you're going to have a community that can do what we want, I think you're going to have to explicitly state that you're looking for people like that. And we may even state it in this -- in this document.
I think if you start to get people who feel that they're representing -- let me be -- let me make my own best friends the bad guys. CMS, for example.
I think that's the wrong person to have on the committee.
That that's -- that's a person that should have a voices in the process, but should not be -- but should not be at the forefront of it. Because they have an agenda, and that's not the goal -- it's not aligned with this -- with this committee.
So I think this is a little bit idealistic. But I think I could name 15 such people, and five more each year, to involve the committee. And we would have to say that that was our goal, and we were looking for that, and that's the way we were going to achieve this broad representation.
I do want to come back to the idea of working groups. There may be situations where it is appropriate for -- for this group to help put a certain kind of focus on certain issues, and for that, it may be that we need working groups.
Now, as I said, very early in these discussions, it was decided that we would have no substructure with working groups. No multilevel org chart. That's okay but if we do that, we have to have the kind of people that I just talked about.
I think we might want to put something in our document that says that the panel can create such working groups, at least in a -- maybe they have a sunset rule, but we should create such working groups if it turns out there's a real value to the communities in doing that.
So that's what I wanted to say.
>> IAN: Yeah, I may be we can add a working group clause.
Yeah. Go ahead.
>> Jan: I strongly agree with Joel's comments about people with agendas. But I want to go back to what Peter said, about people speaking up if they're being left out.
How do they know they're being left out? Are we writing some sort of annual report? My experience, there's lots of cases where people are passed over, and they don't know it until, you know, years later.
It's like, "You did what?"
So how do we increase transparency so that people can follow it, and understand, you know, if they're being left out?
>> IAN: I think -- yeah, there's definitely report -- there's definitely an annual report.
But ...
>> Jan: That would -- [overlapping voices].
>> IAN: I was also looking at the chat. Things in the chat.
>> RUTH: I mean, that does say just -- do we already have something in here about, you know, reporting to -- I don't know the executive committee, of VBF, or posting something in the newsletter every once in a while? I don't know like -- but something where, like, we have some transparent communication about our activities on a regular basis.
>> IAN: There is a -- yeah, there was a whole -- there is a section about -- we should make sure that this is covered in the communication and partnership section.
>> RUTH: Right. Because I don't think that we talked about more communicating -- just more broadly. Like as opposed to just in the computing community. Right? Presumably, we want something that's a communication to everybody, so that they can keep informed and also possibly join, if they see something where ...
>> IAN: Uh-huh.
>> RUTH: -- they think they could have an impact.
>> IAN: Looking through the communication section, I think that's a part that's missing. Most of our communication is down in some sense.
>> RUTH: Right, there is a DPF newsletter, and yeah, that was an example of some place -- that's what I meant when I said newsletter.
>> IAN: And I think in here, we need to add a section about communicate, whether it's to DPF or the whole community. A lot of these things are about communicating with external entities, in particular, that deal with computing --
>> Jan: I was responsible for that section. I'm going to add it.
>> IAN: Perfect. Thank you.
>> JOEL: I want to say a couple of things about using DPF.
But let me say first, that I think we should make sure in here that we have something -- and this is a challenge, like an annual meeting, that is very well advertised. We have to compile lists of lists of lists as part of our communication strategy, so that we get the word out very broadly.
And we should probably have -- try to have something that has a name, that will make it the equivalent of stakeholders' meeting. And if it's an advertised broadly enough, presumably people will come and see if they feel that they're not being -- their problems are not being addressed, and should be by this group, they will say that.
So that's an important thing.
And what I wanted to say is that one of the problems, and I know not everybody is -- well, if Tulka were here, I don't know that she is or not -- she would say this, and she is now the custodian of the DPF newsletter. First of all, it basically goes to DPF people, APS newsletter goes to all of APS. We could use that.
But that does not -- as many people as you would hope, and it is not why we read. We know that.
So in fact, this may be a way to get it more widely read, to have this kind of content in it.
But we have to develop our own communications strategy, which would have to be done, of course, on almost no budget.
And I think we have to use an annual meeting of some kind to develop the community involvement that we need.
>> IAN: We do have a -- [indistinct] -- 1.2.4 -- [reading text rapidly].
>> JOEL: Maybe we should flesh that out. And we want to try to at least initially have it annually, as difficult as this is.
>> PETER: I wanted to comment, you know, the DPF newsletter sounds like the sort of thing, but maybe it needs to be somewhat geared -- or, you know, the community penetration of that made somewhat improved. In the UK, the corresponding things, a newsletter monthly that we call hi-fi, circulated by the council to every single head of group, of an experimental group or a theory group, in the whole of the UK. And they are charged explicitly with forwarding that on to the entire group. All the way down to graduate students.
And it tends to contain all sorts of news like this report of the -- of a working group, or funding calls and all sorts of events are considered of interest to the community. And it's effectively handled by the funding council, the equivalent of the DOE having a quite organized plan to disseminate a newspaper and doing it through heads of group, who are then tasked with forwarding it to all group members.
>> JOEL: So I said I was the idealist -- I was being an idealist at this meeting. Let me revert to my more skeptical. We don't have that, because we simply are organized so that nobody will feel that that's in their mission.
APS and DPF view themselves as communicating mostly on this kind of thing with their own membership.
And, you know, we -- I mean, you know, we have -- have to have independent websites on -- for snow mass, because DPF would not allow us to use their facilities to communicate with people that weren't DPF members.
Now, you know, there's no way that we're going to change this quickly.
I think, you know, we would all love to work towards that.
You know, they can have two security zones, if you like, but they refuse to address that, and many of us -- in fact, you know, three or four of us were in charge of DPF at the time of snow mass, and we couldn't get them to move an inch.
So I -- I would be discouraged with that, and I don't think DOE is a good representative, and you remember that DOE and NSF also were both huge contributors to the funding, and they don't work together that well. So we have problems, there's no question.
And there is some hope, maybe in the future, that we will get something to work. But I really am jealous. I didn't know about this thing that you described. I am jealous of it, because it's such a great idea. So obvious. [Laughing].
>> PETER: I had to try.
>> JOEL: You know, it helps. Everybody here knows what we should be asking for, from the agencies. Right now.
I think -- something like that. Okay.
>> IAN: Other comments?
I would like to propose something that we can then fight about, which is, when I was imagine -- if I'm thinking about the kind of things where people's, like, interests are, like, potentially very different, and we need to have a representation specifically, for me there are sort of three that I would propose that we -- we be prescriptive on, and the rest that we be -- say, this is the kind of things that we expect,, that whoever forms the committee will have reasonable bounds, and I'm prepared to fight about the three.
So the first one is d I was getting say theory versus experiment.
The second one was lab versus university. And the third was career level.
And because for my perspective in terms of interactions with the agencies, career development aspects, there are things that need to be forgot, those three cover a lot of things where there is, like -- in ways that are different from, for instance, large versus small experiment. Where those people, there may not be as big a difference between those that is we think.
Again, also, between the various frontiers there may not be as much in terms of technologies and training and workshops, et cetera. Ruth, go ahead.
>> RUTH: And I don't know if this is fine grained or if this is something we want to cover. But there are people that are going more, like, the academic trademark versus a software engineer or, like, what we call at Fermi lab, an application physicist.
There are different tracks within computing supports physics, and it's at least worth thinking about. Especially in terms of career development. Not everybody can be, you know, like, a university or lab, science physicist, but that doesn't mean they don't have -- like scientist. But that doesn't mean they don't have lots of skills, and that there aren't other positions that they might enjoy and might be well-suited to them.
So I think it's worth thinking about that. I don't know if that's a "versus" anything. It's make sure that we're clear will the career trajectory being, like, broad with many options, and not just, like, making mini-mes.
>> IAN: And I was going to propose to put that into the -- the general -- so when I was being -- saying being prescriptive, I was being very prescriptive. If I was doing theory versus experiment and I follow the suggestion of 40-60, 40% of theory, 6% experiment -- 60% lab, I want propose career level in least all one -- committees, in early career position. That wouldn't -- and then the rest of -- and all of the other attributes I was proposing would be put down as people should be looking for a balance of experiments, and largest -- like -- members of the experiment community, members of the frontiers, et cetera.
>> JOEL: Now you have me confused. I should have raised my hand.
I thought you were proposing three members out of the 20 to be fixed, and the rest to be -- let us say -- generalists, if you like. But that's not what you're proposing.
>> IAN: I'm proposing that everyone be generalists, but if there are attributes that we think are important enough that we don't -- that we're willing to -- I was proposing a limited number of attribute that we should use to -- to make it first pass -- I think everyone needs to be a generalist.
But the question is whether your a general -- I think -- for instance, it would be a mistake if we had a whole bunch of generalists, all of whom were from the lab. Because they have a very different approach to the funding agencies and how their careers are defined, et cetera. That's one of the places where even though they work on the same experiments or the same theory, they have different needs. And different views.
And so there are some things I think that would actually be valuable to sort of be kind of prescriptive about, roughly fifty-fifty, and there might be --
>> JOEL: I'm not clear, fifty-fifty, what is fifty fifty of what? Let's pick a number ... 16, just so it's even. Fifty-fifty applies to what number that's less than or equal to 16?
>> IAN: Eight from the lab, and eight from the university committee. For instance.
>> JOEL: I think that's probably way too prescriptive. You have more people -- well, you have more people on it than we actually have lab. So then we'd wind up more lab representatives than we have labs, actually. But we may have a much more expanded view of the labs that we need to represent before it's all over. It just seems like that's a little bit odd.
>> IAN: Okay.
>> JOEL: And I -- I think the university community, frankly, probably ought to be a little overrepresented, but that's just my opinion.
But I'm a little bit confused about this kind of, you know, I mean I thought you were heading towards getting a relevantly small number of people that guaranteed that these groups would be represented, and then the rest would be more -- less specifically affiliated or identified with those particular issues. And that way you know that things wouldn't be neglected, but you wouldn't be so prescriptive.
>> RUTH: I think roughly fifty-fifty, personally, is not entirely unreasonable. Especially since, at least in theory, a lot of the computational physics heavy lifting is done at the labs.
So you're just -- if you want computational high-energy physicists, there's Brookhaven, Fermi lab, people at Berkeley, at Slack. I mean ...
>> JOEL: I'm not 100% sure that everybody in the academic community would agree that that was -- it may be true in things like lattice gate, but there's all kinds over phenomenology --
>> RUTH: It's true in lattice gauge. It's true in Monte Carlo generators in the US. I'm not talking about people who do PQCD in Europe. Because there they have very active people in universities. I'm talking about the two things I know about. Not things I don't know about.
>> IAN: Charles. You had your hand up.
>> CHARLES: So instead of trying to have a specific split between, you know, the different factions, wouldn't it make more sense to just have a required minimum number from, say, we need at least this number of people from theory, and at least that number of people from the labs and so on.
And then if there's overlap, then great!
>> IAN: Okay.
>> JOEL: But you wouldn't allocate all of the 16 slots to one of these. You would have a smaller core of people that would -- if you like guarantee that the certain -- certain key groups would be represented, or cross-cuts, and the rest would be generalists? That's what I'm looking for. I'm trying to figure out whether you were agreeing with that or taking a different view.
>> IAN: I guess I'm not -- I ...
It's not disagreeing with the view. What I was trying to do is make a distinct between the things that were truly general, that we could just say that you needed a rough balance across these things.
And this things that we thought might less gen.
And I'm also -- I'm happy, things that we say are less general that we need of the incoming class of five people on a 15 person committee that rotates every three years, of those -- on that, like, we expect that at least one of them will be either lab or university.
And we expect that at least one of them will be -- they won't be a five and one of -- they wouldn't be five experimentalists. That's -- that's -- approach.
Peter.
>> PETER: I would just comment that in terms of the word generalists, that kind of implies at least to me that somebody covers the entire spectrum, which is quite hard to do.
I would like to include a list or polygamists or whatever, but they cover more than one area or have a big enough overview to represent multiple people. But it doesn't necessarily mean they have -- because everything from HPC so HT -- [indistinct] -- to AIML, and hard to get people that are quite that broad.
>> IAN: I'm a little uncomfortable with listing that we need a certain number of polygamists, but I'm willing to --
[Laughter].
>> JOEL: I think I agree with Peter.
>> RUTH: I don't know what everybody else thinks of everybody, but I think that most people want to serve the broader community. And I don't really -- I mean, yeah, we've all known the occasional person who can't get outside of themselves and their own interests.
But if we pick people that we know, or I mean, whoever picks, picks people that are known and respected and whatnot. We should expect them to do their job on behalf of a committee.
I don't -- I guess I'm sort of even flagging people as generalists versus not generalists, I don't know what the value in this is.
>> JOEL: Well, you know Ruth I -- I kind of agree with you, on, on the other hand, I've seen ruthless electioneering, by some people that surprised me, to try to get a certain position, a project manager position, try to get their friends those positions.
That's actually pretty rampant in our field. I'm not trying to be -- [overlapping voices].
But that's what I ... see a lot of.
And I -- I don't think computing is bad in this respect, but I think that -- and I think there's also a tendency to -- as you said, trust people that you recognize, and you know for their reputation, but sometimes that doesn't produce the best result either.
>> RUTH: Doesn't always.
>> IAN: To be honest, proposing replacing generalists to service minded, or I think --
>> RUTH: -- we should only be putting people on the committee that are service-minded, full stop. That is a requirement in my view. That they're -- [overlapping voices].
>> That's orthogonal to being generalists. Since we have a lot of people, I don't think they all need to be generalists. We need to make sure the committee represents all views. It doesn't mean that every individual needs to represent all views.
>> JOEL: Generalists should be replaced with some words, somebody can come up with a better phrase. But broad perspective.
>> PETER: Breadth of knowledge.
>> JOEL: Something like that. Yeah.
>> DANIEL: I think that, you know, different people should represent different backgrounds. Maybe that's the way we should say it.
And maybe we should say explicitly, they wouldn't be representing either the theory community or experimental community or the CMS experiment, or whatever. Right?
So people would be selected according to their experience and background by -- for belonging to one or more of those groups. And they are not representatives of those groups.
Maybe we should find a way to explicitly say that. Rather than saying, you know, service-oriented. And I agree.
That -- that has to be taken for granted.
ªRUTH:^ yes, please, thank you. I'm tired of -- [overlapping voices] -- women. I don't. We --
>> IAN: I guess there -- we don't have a ton of time left. There is one sort of thing I would like to make a decision about, which is, I can imagine two approaches to writing this document.
One to say that we would like people who have a breadth of knowledge and are willing to represent -- they represent various pieces of the community and whoever chooses the committee should balance out a group -- a bunch -- of attributes. Done.
And not -- the other approach is similar to that, except with one minor modification, which is that we put in a few guardrails that say, on the incoming members of the community, there should never be a time when we for instance only have theorists or only experimentalists, or we only choose representation from only the universities -- are there particular attributes where we want guardrails or not.
And we find a set of people that have a breadth of knowledge, and go.
And the other is whether we want to put in guardrails. And I'm happy with either.
>> JOEL: So, you know, I'm -- also probably happy with either approach.
But I -- I think it would be interesting to try to see how you would write down a system that had some guardrails. I'm a little bit -- although it's in a different space. US Lou does a very good job of making sure that somehow no community disappears from -- they only have five identifiable communities.
But they make sure that none of them disappear from representation.
At least not for very long. And that's a challenge, because some of the communities that are actually very small, and some are very big.
But we could try to write something like that for, you know, not most of, but some of the positions, I mean, we should certainly never not have a theorist on it. We should certainly never not have an experimentalist. We should never not have a lab person.
So there are all kinds of things. And I think we want to have -- I don't think we can do it in groups of five. There will be a bunch of nominations. There will be a need to select five more people. You can look to see what you might have -- might be missing or weak, for whatever reason. And try to pick the five to make sure that the 15 for the next year have the right balance. Which is a slightly different way of saying what you said, I think.
Because five is a small number to work with. But if you know that you're weak, and -- and say theory, or event -- you know, generators or something haven't been -- are not representative, and that's going to be hard.
You might emphasize that a little bit in the selection process.
I hope you can figure out how to say that nicely.
>> IAN: -- try, but one of the things I was thinking about, on some of the things that were truly guardrail level, they might apply to the five. Do we want to be in a situation where there's only five university people in the five incoming people. And if not -- but I think some things like a particular field of physics, or, like, two members of an -- member of atlas or a member of CMS, if there wasn't one of those in the five, that's not necessarily an indication of a problem.
But ...
>> JOEL: Yeah, so again, as I said, I can -- I certainly feel that that would work pretty well.
But think about this the following way:
You look at the committee. The panel.
And you see that the actual activity on the theory front, on the event generator front, on -- is going along fine.
And there are already people that have a couple of years left in their term that are -- that are going to continue, and you see there's a weak area, and, you know, would you decide that year to not necessarily add a person in the area that's doing well, and not add one in the area that's --
>> IAN: Yeah --
>> JOEL: -- that's the question I'm asking.
>> IAN: And I think we should write in the text, the people who are making the nominations and selecting the committee members should be forward-looking in terms of, in some sense, need rather than, like, how much new -- like, how many news or how -- level -- the activity, like, need versus activity is probably I think that we should look at things where people are being under represented or where the community is in need of exposure.
So Peter put into the text that the committee should include individuals with experience from X, Y, and Z, rather than representatives of. And I'm saying that because it will end up in the real-time transcription, in which case it will be available, because I'm not sure the chat itself is actually typed in.
What is said, gets typed in.
All right.
>> PETER: Can I just -- beyond that, that comment about changing the language of it from representation, the other place that the community will -- in principle, be happy about the independent of who's in the committee is this highlighted text you have right now, which is that ensuring that this annual workshop is very inclusive in who comes to it that's able to participate and things like that.
To me that bottoms-up things is maybe as critical as the sort of top-down committee ... range of experience, let's say, rather than representation.
>> IAN: Agreed. Peter.
>> PETER: Because getting it said verbally is important from what you said, I put into the chat a comment that we're spending a lot of time talking about communities and fiefdoms and domains, or territories, and I think it's important, and part -- was identifying the mapping between the matrix between frontiers and areas, and technical classifications of computing. We do want to make sure that we have a representation of the diversity of the accompanying types. To identify -- an -- an event generation, but HPC work, NPI parallel jobs used for a lot -- really massive scale simulation, and cosmo, and -- [indistinct] -- among others, and the accelerator modeling people are doing that.
And there's a lot of AIML-type emergent computing that I think the -- [chuckling] -- entire community needs to be keeping on the ball, and able to develop and so on.
And you know, these are somewhat different to the -- the simple subject classification-type mapping, and they're identifying this kind of matrix was a key part of the snow mass exercise in the computational frontier.
>> IAN: As we get to the top of the hour, there's, like -- there were just two things -- the other two items on the agenda were -- I would encourage people to review the document in Overleaf.
There is texts that are -- there's -- there's text in all of the sections now that people can add to and should be commenting on.
And the one thing that there are -- we have typically described it as actions, because I think I described it as action. The original document for CPAD basically made the recommendations, and I'm tempted to make a global search and replace for actions versus recommendations, because it's a sort of set of advice for the committee.
And so I may do that.
And then the final thing was -- there was a discussion about having a face to face meeting at the end of the DPF pheno workshop, in May in Pittsburgh. Which would be May 17th.
>> JOEL: Yes.
>> IAN: And the question I -- so I -- it was -- and I can also circulate this by mail, because not everyone is here.
But basically, the idea was how many people would think that was -- like, that exercise, hopefully, is sort of the final -- we're going through this, making the -- we are deciding -- we're word smithing the final document and deciding on the final conclusions of that report. Which I hope is essentially that's the last act. And if it would be interesting to do that in person, we have the opportunity to have a room on that Friday afternoon.
That particular week conflicts with the WSCG workshop in Hamburg for some people. And the question -- and I will circulate by email so people can decide. Maybe I'll put a doodle poll up. It doesn't make sense to do if nobody can come, and -- or if nobody finds it valuable. But we need to give the potential host a heads-up.
Are there any strong feelings that people have, to be given orally now?
>> MATTHEW: So Peter left, but I'll mention that in a recent executive board meeting we were discussing this, and Peter had actually mentioned that in his mind, that Friday is kind of untenable for him and he thinks a few others.
So I'm -- he has unfortunately left so I don't remember the full extent of the suggestions that he had for finding an alternative.
But I think your suggestion, Ian, of circulating this by email is a good one.
>> IAN: I will make a doodle poll. My guess, it's probably that we -- yeah, I won't -- I won't ...
Indicate an opinion yet. We'll see.
>> MATTHEW: [Chuckling] sounds good. Thanks.
>> IAN: Okay?
I won't prejudice it. That was the word I was looking for.
All right.
Is there anything else for today? If not ...
Actions, I will try to -- I will try to write up some of our discussions today in Overleaf. People should feel free to pack it up themselves.
... after I've done that.
And we would meet on our schedule, we would meet two weeks from today, which I believe is ...
It must be April.
>> MATTHEW: The fourth?
>> IAN: Yeah.
>> Jan: Question about the Overleaf format. Are we leaving this in bullet point format, or are we actually writing text -- [overlapping voices] -- I was not sure.
But it feels -- it's easier to read if this is actual text.
>> IAN: Right. I think it needs to be actual text.. the bullet points for a framework for people to hang things on -- detail that can be added, and people -- we should be working on that.
>> Jan: Thank you.
>> IAN: All right. Okay. I will talk to you all soon. [Participants say thank you and good-bye].
This is being provided in a rough-draft format. Live captioning, or Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART), is provided by a human stenographer in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. There may be mistakes or untranslates due to inaudibility or the rapid speech pattern of the speaker.