The CERN Knowledge Transfer (KT) entrepreneurship meet-ups (or EM-Us) are the ideal place to discuss entrepreneurship and innovation at CERN.

The latest inspiring story comes from a former CERN robotics engineer, Axel Voitier, who worked in the Engineering department. Having worked nearly a decade on managing data coming from the industrial control systems on the LHC, now he will be focusing on the data to help manage “smart urban farms”. Indeed, Axel is currently setting up a company dedicated to this new type of farming, an internet-of-things approach where control systems are used to manage urban farms automatically

“Data is the new petrol,” says Axel, “but I am interested in having a direct impact on the final users. This is why the security aspect is vital, because even though it relies on an abundance of data, the project must be user-centric – not data-centric – to be successful.”

The progression from robotics engineer to entrepreneur builds on the knowledge Axel acquired while working at CERN, both for the technological and business aspects.

He had been toying with the idea of starting his own company for a while. Then he heard of the new Entrepreneurship meet-ups that the KT group was setting up. The first one was held in 2015, and Axel grabbed the opportunity to find out more about entrepreneurship and how CERN could help him see his dream come true. “I felt my professional project was supported by CERN,” he underlines. “It was the information from the meet-ups that convinced me to make the jump. In fact, I met the urban farm collective at one of the EM-Us,” he says.

In preparation for his startup, he is currently part of an urban farm collective called Exodes Urbains, which already has an aquaponics set-up behind the Geneva central station in Switzerland, a few kilometres from CERN. Aquaponics is an agricultural system where the waste produced by farmed fish provides the nutrients required for the culture of plants. The control system aspect of it is built on free and open source software, in line with CERN’s tradition of openness.

What advice does Axel have for aspiring entrepreneurs? “Do your homework,” he advises. “Technological knowledge is not enough, and you should bounce your ideas off experienced entrepreneurs.” He adds that the Entrepreneurship meet-ups were central to both his motivation, and his understanding of his own project. And once the homework is done? Axel summarises his own adventure: “Don’t be afraid of the mountain.”

The Entrepreneurship Meet-Ups (EM-Us) are organized by the CERN Knowledge Transfer group. They are held every other week at CERN, and they are open to all those who are interested in learning more about entrepreneurship and innovation, with or without a particular project in mind.

Each meeting has an overarching topic, sometimes introduced by external guest speakers. Past speakers have included experts from incubation centres, business schools as well as entrepreneurs. The meetings are focused on exchanging around the given day’s theme.

For more information and to sign up to the mailing list, read more here: http://cern.ch/kt/meet-up.

The LHC has recently enjoyed a period of steady running and managed to set a new record for “Maximum Stable Luminosity Delivered in 7 days” of 3.29 fb^-1 between 29 August and 4 September. The number of bunches per beam remains pegged at 2220 because of the limitations imposed by the SPS beam dump. The bunch population is also somewhat reduced due to outgassing near one of the injection kickers at point 8. Both limitations will be addressed during the year-end technical stop, opening the way for increased performance in 2017.

On 10 and 11 September, a two day machine development (MD) period took place. The MD programme included a look at the possibility of reducing the crossing angle at the high-luminosity interaction points. The crossing angles are an essential feature of the machine set-up, intended to avoid undesired collisions of bunches either side of the interaction point when the beams are travelling in a single beam pipe. Despite crossing at an angle, the bunches still interact with each other via long-range electromagnetic interactions. The crossing angles therefore have to be big enough to ensure sufficient separation, reducing this long-range beam-beam effect to an acceptable level.

However, a distinct drawback of the increase in the crossing angle is a decrease in luminosity, with the reduction factor depending on the crossing angle, bunch length and beam size. Under the present LHC parameters, the high luminosity experiments see around 60% of what they would if we could operate without a crossing angle.

Two measures are being explored to claw back some of this reduction. One is a reduction of the crossing angle at the start of a fill. We can consider this because of the smaller than nominal beams being delivered by the injectors (smaller beams means better separation at the long range encounters). The aim is to restart physics in the last few months of the year with the crossing angle reduced from 370 to 280 microradians. This should increase the peak luminosity by around 15%. The second approach, targeted by the MD, is a stepwise reduction of the crossing angle during a fill as the bunch population decreases. This will not be implemented this year but could be used after appropriate tests in 2017.

A five-day technical stop followed the MD period. One of the major interventions performed during the stop was the replacement of the bushings on the transformer damaged by the “weasel” earlier this year.

Finally, this week a four-day special physics run for the forward experiments will start. It will be aimed at measuring small angle elastic proton–proton scattering. You can read more about this special physics run here. 

Usually, the motto of the LHC is “maximum luminosity”. But for a few days per year, the LHC ignores its motto to run at very low luminosity for the forward experiments. This week, the LHC will provide the TOTEM and ATLAS/ALFA experiments with data for a broad physics programme.

The TOTEM experiment at Point 5 and the ATLAS/ALFA experiment at Point 1 study the elastic scattering of protons, which are not observable in normal operation runs. In the elastic scattering process, the two protons survive their encounter intact and only change directions by exchanging momentum.

To allow this special run, the operators play with the so-called beta-star parameter. The higher the beta star, the more de-squeezed the beams are, and the more parallel the beams are when they arrive at the interaction point. For this special run, the beta-star had to be raised to 2.5 km (whereas in normal runs it is as small as 0.4 m).

Running with such a high beta-star parameter is an achievement: during Run 1, at 8 TeV, a value of 1 km was reached. But with a higher energy, the two incoming protons deviate by smaller angles, for equal transferred momentum. Since the TOTEM and ATLAS/ALFA Roman Pot detectors cannot be moved closer to the beams, the beta-star parameter must be raised to even higher values to provide acceptance for the smaller angles. “The effort that is required for the machine to deliver beams with such a high value of the beta-star parameter is extremely challenging,” says Simone Giani, spokesperson of the TOTEM Collaboration. “We are very thankful to the LHC team for having pushed the machine to such extreme settings,” adds Karlheinz Hiller, ALFA project leader.

The TOTEM physics programme foreseen for this special high beta-star run features many interesting measurements. In addition to the precise determination of the total proton-proton interaction probability (closely related to the “cross-section”) at 13 TeV, TOTEM will focus on a detailed study of the region of low transferred momentum of the elastic scattering, that is, when the two protons barely interact and the scattering angles are very small.

An in-depth study of this region is important for many different reasons. First of all, the interaction probability seems to diverge for very small transferred momenta, but as this should not be physically possible, a detailed study of that region will shed light on what is happening when the two protons almost don’t interact.

Secondly, in the same region, the contribution of the electromagnetic interaction (“Coulomb” scattering) interferes with the nuclear part of the elastic interaction. Studying this interference zone can shed light on the internal structure of the protons, and on which part of the protons (either the peripheral or the inner part) is actually responsible for the elastic scattering process.

Moreover, it is also possible to get information on the probability that two protons pass through each other without interfering, transparently. “This might appear awkward if you think of a proton as a billiard ball,” notes Simone Giani. “But the protons should be thought as multi-body quantum systems.”

In other words, to use a metaphor, one can imagine the two scattering protons as two large “galaxies” (made internally of tiny moving particles) launched at high speed against each other: there is a finite probability that the two “galaxies” will pass through each other without the inner particles interacting significantly.

Finally, the TOTEM collaboration plans to conduct physics studies looking for evidence of special states formed by three gluons, which are theoretically predicted but for which the experimental evidence is still weak.

The physics goal of the ATLAS/ALFA experiment is also to perform a precision measurement of the proton-proton total cross section, but then to use this to determine the absolute LHC luminosity at Point 1 for the 2.5 km run.

For ATLAS/ALFA, the interesting part of the spectrum is at low values of transferred momentum, where Coulomb scattering is dominant: since the Coulomb scattering cross-section is theoretically known, its measurement gives an independent estimate of the absolute luminosity of the LHC. The luminosity measurements are otherwise normally done via Van der Meer scans, during the standard high-luminosity runs.

“With good statistics – such as 10 million good elastic events – we hope to be able to measure the absolute luminosity with a 3% precision,” says Patrick Fassnacht, deputy project leader of the ATLAS/ALFA project.

The latest results published by the TOTEM Collaboration include a first observation of deviations from a pure exponential form of the elastic cross-section at 8 TeV. More information on the TOTEM website.

The latest result published by the ATLAS/ALFA Collaboration is the measurement of the total cross section from proton-proton elastic scattering at 7 and 8 TeV with the beta-star parameter at 90 m, whereas the data with beta-star at 1 km are still under analysis. More information on the ATLAS/ALFA website.

Lluis Miralles, head of the Site Management and Buildings Department, Jose Miguel Jimenez, head of the Technology Department, Roberto Losito, head of the Engineering Department, and Simon Baird, head of the Occupational Health and Safety and Environmental Protection Unit, officially laid the foundation stone of Building 311 during a ceremony on Thursday, 22 September.

Situated beside the water tower, the building will house a magnetic measurement laboratory for the Technology Department. With a floor space of around 1400 square metres, it will comprise a main hall for testing magnets on the ground floor and a mezzanine with offices on the first floor. Work began in April and the main construction (walls and roof) should be finished in May 2017, with the completed building ready at the end of the year. Just to make things more interesting, because of the building’s proximity to the tunnel of old Intersecting Storage Rings (ISR) accelerator, the designers had to anchor it in the ground using tilted piles. 

The annual meeting of ENLIGHT (European Network for Light Hadron Therapy), which gathers experts working worldwide in centres and research institutions for particle therapy for cancer treatment, was hosted this year by the Dutch National Institute for Subatomic Physics (Nikhef) and the University of Utrecht, in the Netherlands, from 15-17 September. Chaired by the co-coordinator of ENLIGHT, Manjit Dosanjh, and the local organisers, Els Koffeman and Jan Visser from Nikhef, the meeting was attended by almost 100 participants from 15 countries.

The Netherlands took centre stage at the ENLIGHT meeting: four brand new centres for proton therapy in the Netherlands are currently at various phases of completion as a consequence of the recent approval by the Dutch government of a plan for making proton therapy available nationwide. The establishment of these centres and their mode of collaboration for making this cancer treatment available throughout the country was indeed one of the key points of discussion of the meeting.

Many other hot topics were discussed, including recent progress and technological breakthroughs in medical imaging, the importance of using a standard “normal tissue control probability” (NTCP) model for selecting patients for treatment with particles (protons, carbon and so on), and the need for access to and sharing of clinical data for selecting patients and monitoring outcomes.

Two full sessions were dedicated to medical imaging, given its key role in delivering an effective dose to the target tumour site while minimising the side effects on healthy tissues: the volume and position of the tumour has to be assessed before, after and during treatment whenever possible  by using a whole range of imaging tools, such as the Positron Emission Tomography (PET), Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) and Computed Tomography (CT) scans,– alone or in combination. Moving organs such as lungs presents a challenging task for medical imaging, since the position of the tumour has to be monitored while it is being treated. The integration of MRI with a linear accelerator, for example, can provide image-guidance that is simultaneous with treatment, thus reducing the patient’s exposure to the additional ionising radiation of CT scans.

Time was also given to young researchers: on the second day of meeting the authors of three winning posters were given the chance to present their work to the ENLIGHT participants.

For the first time since the establishment of the network in 2002, this year the annual ENLIGHT meeting concluded with a one-day training session on key aspects of particle therapy, including radiobiology, medical imaging and data sharing. In fact, particle therapy centres require highly trained staff, and yet few experts exist in this rapidly expanding field. The training session was highly appreciated by the members of the community, so a similar course will be offered at the next annual meeting, to be held in June 2017.

The location selected for next year is Aarhus, which will be the home of the first particle therapy centre in Denmark, and the meeting will coincide with the installation of the cyclotron in the facility.

Android could be facing another Armageddon, just as we saw with the “Stagefright” vulnerability last summer (see “Android’s Armageddon”). But while that “Mother of all Android Vulnerabilities” targeted Android’s Multimedia Messaging Service, this time the driver for Qualcomm’s LTE chipset is in the firing line… And as before, while a fix for this vulnerability has been quickly made available, the big problem has been getting this fix to your Android device: mobile phone manufacturers and providers are incredibly slow at passing it along…

What can you do to get this fix? Basically, there's nothing you can do but wait. For certain smartphone models (e.g. HTC One M9 and HTC 10; LG G4, G5, and V10; Samsung Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge; and others), you are completely exposed. This four-fold vulnerability, dubbed “QuadRooter”, in the driver for the LTE mobile communication chipset of Android smartphones can be exploited by just one malicious app… Once installed, it becomes “root”, the master and commander-in-chief of that smartphone. Luckily, so far, no public exploitation of that vulnerability has been reported! Potential defences? Usually we would recommend applying the corresponding fix made by Google. However, this requires your preferred smartphone manufacturer to adapt that patch to your hardware. And, as experience has shown, this can take a while or might never happen. Alternatively, you can try to re-compile your Android device’s operating system yourself – but this is an approach recommended only for experts.

So, interesting times lie ahead. Not only for Androids but also for many other devices. Vulnerability disclosure cycles are getting faster and faster, and patching, i.e. fixing those vulnerabilities, must be done more promptly. With a world full of smartphones, the Internet-of-Things, inter-connected fridges and cars (see the article “Our life in symbiosis”), and SmartMeters, a new patching paradigm is needed… Today, our patching methods are too slow and inflexible (see the article “Agility for computers”). Android’s Armageddon is just another example.

P.S.: If you believe that Apple’s iOS is better… Er, no, as the recent “Pegasus” exploit showed. However, at least Apple controls the update chain, so security fixes are always rolled out quickly (for iOS versions 9 and above).

For further information, questions or help, check our website or contact us at Computer.Security@cern.ch.

Do you want to learn more about computer security incidents and issues at CERN? Follow our Monthly Report. 

Access the entire collection of Computer Security articles here.

The LHC is colliding protons at a faster rate than ever before: approximately 1 billion times per second.

Since April 2016, the LHC has delivered more than 30 inverse femtobarn (fb^-1) to both ATLAS and CMS. This means that around 2.4 quadrillion (2.4 million billion) collisions have been seen by each of the experiments this year. The inverse femtobarn is the unit of measurement for integrated luminosity, indicating the cumulative number of potential collisions.

This compares with the total of 33.2 fb^-1 produced between 2010 and 2015.

The unprecedented performance this year is the result of both the incremental increases in collision rate and the sheer amount of time the LHC is up and running.

This comes after a slow start-up in 2015, when scientists and engineers still needed to learn how to operate the machine at a much higher energy.

“With more energy, the machine is much more sensitive,” says Jorg Wenninger, the head of the LHC operations team. “We decided not to push it too much so that we could learn about the machine and how to operate at 13 TeV. Last year we had good performance and no real show-stoppers, so now we are focusing on pushing up the luminosity.”

Astonishingly, 2.4 quadrillion collisions represent only 1 percent of the total amount of collisions planned during the lifetime of the LHC research program. The LHC is scheduled to run through 2037 and will undergo several rounds of upgrades to further increase the collision rate.

Two teams of high-school students from the UK and Poland had the opportunity to conduct their own experiments at a fully equipped CERN beamline, after winning the Beamline for Schoolscompetition.

The teams, ”Pyramid Hunters” from Poland and “Relatively Special” from the United Kingdom, spent 10 days at CERN conducting the experiments they had dreamt up in their winning proposals.

The Beamline for Schools competition gives high-school students the chance to run an experiment on a fully equipped CERN beamline, in the same way researchers do at the Large Hadron Collider and other CERN facilities every day.

To know more about their stay at CERN and the experiments they’ve conducted, read the full article here.

Stefania Pandolfi

A safe(ty) day

For their first day at CERN, 16 youngsters spent the day learning about safety.  The students were so driven to start performing their experiments that they couldn’t wait to jump straight into the East Area. But they learned that, besides the exciting experience of doing an experiment here, one must never forget to be safe. “Safety first” is our motto, indeed.

In the morning, they listened to presentations on safety hazards and computer security and also followed e-learning courses at the Technical Training Centre. They spent the afternoon at the Safety Training Centre in Prevessin. There, they visited the mock-up LHC tunnel and participated in classroom-based courses about cryogenic safety and fire extinguishers. Can you guess what they enjoyed the most?

Ewa, from the Polish team, says she learnt a lot about fires and how they spread. She feels safer now. “We were told about safety procedures and how nothing happens to you if you follow them,” she explains.

James, a member of the UK team, says: “For our project, we had to study the instructions for the fire extinguisher attentively before coming, but we never got the chance to actually use one. I couldn’t believe it when I had to do it as part of the fire extinguisher training!”

Being able to use a fire extinguisher properly is something that could come in handy in our daily life too, unlike handling cryogenic fluids. “The topic of cryogenic safety was covered in such a way that it wasn’t complex for me to understand,” explains Timothy, another member of the UK team. He was extremely impressed by the course and by seeing the liquid air droplets bursting into sparks, so as to explain the hazard related to oxygen enriched air. “It was very interesting and made me understand the danger and the importance of being properly trained”.

Rosaria Marraffino

Around 600 visitors came to CERN for the 2016 European Researchers’ Night held on 30 September of this year. 

The programme of events on offer at the Globe of Science and Innovation between 6 p.m. and 11 p.m. included guided tours of the ATLAS Visitor Centre, which attracted 500 people, access to the Universe of Particles exhibition, and screenings of CineGlobe documentaries and short films, which were nearly all sold-out. The first floor of the Globe proved to be too small for the screening of the BBC Horizon documentary “Inside CERN”.

CERN also offered web-based activities. These online events allowed European partner institutions (from Austria, England, Finland, Hungary, Italy, and Malta), as well as everybody else, to connect to the CCC, LHCb, Data Centre, ALICE and CMS websites for 45 minute-long virtual tours, with interactive question-and-answer sessions. Around 400 participants from institutions, as well as 950 others, from countries including the USA, Germany, Mexico and Spain, watched these virtual tours.

In total, almost 2000 people participated in the event, from near or far, making it a resounding success. See you next year!

At the end of September HIE-ISOLDE celebrated the first physics experiment successfully started running using radioactive beams from the newly upgraded HIE-ISOLDE facility. The experiment was ready to go after the second of two cryomodules (containing the accelerating cavities) were installed – marking the end of the installation of phase one of HIE-ISOLDE. This new linear accelerator enables ISOLDE to reach higher energy. A celebration, hosted by Belgian State Secretary Ms Elke Sleurs, was held on 28 September 2016 to mark the occasion. You can see more images from the day here.   (Image:  Julien Ordan/ CERN)

Being flashed by a speed camera on the motorway is a nuisance but it’s usually your fault: you were speeding. Looks like using “Flash” on your computer nowadays is a similar blunder: this year, the Adobe Flash Player made it to number 1 in the charts of ways in which your PC or laptop could be compromised!

Just recently, another vulnerability for Flash was reported, affecting all operating systems: Windows, Mac, Linux and Chrome OS. One vulnerability to rule them all. This is also the main reason why Flash topped the charts at number 1! The first exploits abusing this vulnerability have been already reported and it is now up to all of us to fix our operating systems ASAP. As usual, owners of CERN centrally managed Windows PCs don’t need to worry. Their PCs will have this fix automagically deployed.

But more generally, why do we still stick with Flash? Its time has passed and it is being superseded by the more fancy and modern HTML5. The IT department is therefore actively eliminating any requirement for it in central services and considering dropping the installation of Flash from all of its centrally managed PCs. And since they are already at it, Adobe’s Acrobat Reader, which is also a prominent member of the top-10 vulnerabilities, might be phased out too. Of course, there will be suitable alternatives offered for both. So, why would you still need Flash for professional purposes? Send us your opinion!

For further information, questions or help, check our website or contact us at Computer.Security@cern.ch.

Do you want to learn more about computer security incidents and issues at CERN? Follow our Monthly Report. 

Access the entire collection of Computer Security articles here.

Cycling between Meyrin and Prévessin just got better. Since the new cycle path on the Route de l’Europe opened a few days ago, cyclists can now get from one site to the other in complete safety. Likewise, cyclists from Prévessin can get to CERN or the tram terminus more easily from their commune. The path was officially opened on Friday, 14 October, in the presence of local politicians as well as CERN representatives. 

The new cycle path, which is 2.4 kilometres long, took seven months to complete. It was financed by CERN, the local authorities and also by funds from the CERN-Pays de Gex Consultation Committee. These funds, earned by renting CERN land to farmers, are used to finance projects benefiting the public, like cycle paths, as in this case.

For the moment, the path stops just before the traffic lights by the Prévessin site. However, a new crossroads, with traffic lights for cars and bikes, will be created in 2017.  Work is due to begin next spring.

Whether you’re on the path or on the road, don’t forget to wear a helmet and reflective clothing, and obey the rules of the road.

No cash for your meal? No longer a problem. From Tuesday, 18 October, you can pay with your smartphone!

In all of its restaurant facilities on the Meyrin site (Restaurants 1 and 2 and snack bars), Novae is installing an online payment system, the Mobino app.
Using it is simple:
- Download the Mobino app (free of charge) and turn on your phone’s Bluetooth
- Connect the app to your bank account (either euros or Swiss francs)
- Credit your account with the desired amount of money
- Pay for your food and drink at the till

The system is free to use, so you pay exactly the same amount as you would in cash. Using Bluetooth allows you to pay more quickly at the till, but if you can’t activate it you can simply enter a number that is given to you at the till.

Mobino is an approved financial intermediary in Switzerland and works with all European banks debiting in Swiss francs or euros. For payments above €20 or 20 CHF, you will have to enter the password chosen when you first connected the app to your bank account.

Watch this short video for step-by-step instructions.

Studies relating to both the LHC and its luminosity upgrade, the HL-LHC, were carried out. Work has been done on a special setting of the focusing magnets in the LHC, which are required to keep the beams in the machine aperture and to focus them to very small sizes at the heart of the experiments. This configuration of the LHC optics (called Achromatic Telescopic Squeeze) is baseline for the HL-LHC and is being considered for operational use in 2017.

Detailed aperture measurements and collimator tests were performed. The results of these tests indicate that the LHC team can continue the annual reduction in beam size at the LHC high-luminosity interaction points in 2017 by bringing the collimators even closer to the beam core.

The battle with electron cloud is not over and it is currently unclear whether the LHC arcs will ever become electron-cloud free. In the quest to find a solution, the LHC was half-filled with the usual 25-ns beams and half-filled with a new bunch pattern consisting of eight bunches followed by four empty buckets. This configuration decreases the heat load to the cryogenics system from the electron cloud by about a factor of two. This approach could be an alternative for operating the high-intensity HL-LHC beams in the event of a persistent electron cloud.

Single bunches with HL-LHC-like brightness have been brought to 6.5 TeV and put in collision for a sufficient amount of time for the first time. The LHC beams are being made extremely stable using new techniques, and this is an important result as we look to the very high bunch population demanded by the HL-LHC.

The baseline operational mode of the radio frequency cavities in the HL-LHC, known as Full Detuning, leaves some freedom to play with the bunches: the bunches are now located within the constraints of the RF system in a configuration that minimises the required RF power. This new way of running the radio frequency cavities has just been demonstrated for the first time at 6.5 TeV.

Finally, several studies took place with a view to optimising and further improving the beam instrumentation to measure beam sizes and other beam characteristics with high precision. All these studies will hopefully result in more collisions and more luminosity for the LHC experiments in the short- and long-term future.

The LHC exited the MD session into the year’s final two weeks or so of proton physics, while the teams are already sneaking in some preparation for the upcoming proton-lead run.

The new Bulletin has arrived in your inbox. Renamed the CERN Community Bulletin, this new-style newsletter covers all of the news and announcements published on the CERN Community page.

From now on, the newsletter and the website will give you the same information:

• To keep up to date with news, official communications, events, training and other CERN announcements, check the CERN Community website, which is frequently updated.
• Like the old Bulletin, the CERN Community Bulletin will be automatically sent to you twice a month. It will contain the information published on the CERN Community website in the previous fortnight.

In short, find things out more quickly on the CERN Community website and receive a compilation in the newsletter every fortnight.

All articles published since March 2016 are on the CERN Community website. You can search the website using the search bar in the bottom right corner of the page. To search in English go to the English site, or to search in French go to the French site. For articles published before March 2016, consult the CDS archives. From now on, PDF versions of the Bulletin will also be archived in CDS.

If the newsletter’s is not correctly displayed when it arrives in your inbox, please be patient. Our team is all set to deal with the new system’s teething problems. If you have any questions, feel free to contact us at this address.

You can submit an idea for an article or announcement by completing this form.

Happy reading!

The Editorial Content Development Section, Education, Communication and Outreach group

An experiment at the n_TOF facility at CERN filled in a missing piece of the  cosmological lithium problem puzzle. The n_TOF collaboration published a study providing a precise new measurement of one of the processes involved in the cosmic production of lithium.

For more information, read the update published on the CERN Home page.

UNOSAT has been hosted by CERN’s IT department since its inception in 2001, and relies on the Laboratory’s IT infrastructure to produce extremely precise maps of regions of the world affected or threatened by natural disaster or conflict. “The maps we produce are very high resolution, up to 30 cm,” says Einar Bjorgo, who manages the UNOSAT programme. “They are an essential tool for teams in the field arranging aid and sustainable reconstruction.” Thanks to these maps, UNOSAT has already helped guide emergency teams through various locations, such as in West Africa since 2014 in the fight against the Ebola epidemic, in Nepal after the series of earthquakes that hit the region in spring 2015, or at present in the context of the Syrian conflict or just this past week, in Haiti, to assess the damage of Hurricane Matthew.

To produce these maps, the UNOSAT team uses very high resolution satellite images made available by space agencies and public and private satellite data providers. These raw satellite images are stored on CERN’s servers and, thanks to the technology of the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid, are then transformed into legible, downloadable maps. “CERN’s support is essential,” adds Einar Bjorgo. “Without its powerful IT infrastructure, we wouldn’t be able to compile the satellite data we receive to make it usable.”

Over the years, the programme’s maps have become web-based and more and more dynamic thanks to daily updates and the addition of photographs taken in the field by UNOSAT agents and volunteers. “We have developed a smartphone application called UN-ASIGN, which allows people to take photos, geo-locate them and share them with UNOSAT,” explains Einar Bjorgo. “These images provide us with vital information and help us to evaluate the situation in the field.”

UNOSAT is now also collaborating with UNESCO on the protection of cultural sites, particularly in conflict zones. “When there is an armed conflict, it is difficult for UNESCO agents to get to cultural sites and evaluate their condition,” says Einar Bjorgo. “Our very high resolution maps allow them to get an initial overview of any damage.” In the framework of this collaboration, UNOSAT has already published several reports, notably on the condition of Syrian cultural sites.

The programme also plays a fundamental role in training government officials. For over ten years, UNOSAT’s four agencies, at CERN, N’Djamena (Chad), Nairobi (Kenya) and Bangkok (Thailand), have been providing training in the use of geospatial IT tools for various applications, such as risk management in the event of natural disasters, water management and town planning. “It is essential for every country in the world to be able to benefit from the tools developed by UNOSAT for development purposes,” concludes Einar Bjorgo. “This is enshrined both in the new sustainable development goals adopted by the UN and in UNOSAT’s own mission statement.”

• For all the latest news on UNOSAT, visit UNITAR’s Facebook page or follow UNOSAT on Twitter (@UNOSAT)

CERN’s new on-line journal CERN IdeaSquare Journal of Experimental Innovation (CIJ) will publish empirical and theoretical research on the practice of strategic technology and innovation management. It is a multi-disciplinary, open on-line journal that focuses on in-situ innovation experimentation, strategic innovation management, knowledge transfer and management, and innovation policy issues.

“At CERN we experiment with new ideas all the time, and IdeaSquare is a key part of that drive towards innovation,” says Charlotte Warakaulle, Director for International Relations at CERN. “Here, we bring together people from the worlds of scientific instruments-building and societal action to find practical solutions to challenges on the ground, in humanitarian work and in many other areas. It is an innovative process with innovative outcomes,“ she adds.

Roberto Verganti, Professor of Leadership and Innovation at Politecnico di Milano continues that “CIJ will also give means to document the societal impact of the student projects at IdeaSquare and elsewhere”.

“IdeaSquare and CIJ offer a new and unique platform to carry out and investigate student’s experimentation-driven innovation, inspired by the way CERN does frontier physics research” explain Markus Nordberg and Saku Mäkinen, Professor of Industrial Management at Tampere University of Technology/Director at Helsinki Institute of Physics/CERN and Editor in Chief of the New Journal.

“Without experimentation, no real innovation is possible,” says Saku Mäkinen. “The process of innovation is just as important as the products of this creative process. This is why we are excited to launch this new journal reporting results of contemporary research on the innovation experimentations.”

The CIJ aims to increase our understanding of how the innovation process happens, and what are the best conditions to efficiently accelerate innovation. It also aims to investigate how innovation permeates into society and how new innovations are adopted, modified and even eventually discarded. In that sense, the CIJ is interested in the social dimensions of experimentation in innovation, as well as the innovation management aspect.

For more information, see the full article published on the Knowledge Transfer website.

Call for papers

Call for papers for a CIJ Special Issue “Experimenting in Innovation”

Submission deadline: 31^st December 2016

Special issue editors:

Roberto Verganti, Politecnico di Milano

Fredrik Hacklin, ETH Zurich

Philipp Tuertscher, VU University Amsterdam

Saku Mäkinen, Tampere University of Technology

We are very pleased to announce a call for papers for the first special issue for the CERN Idea Square Journal of Experimental Innovation (CIJ).

For more information, see the full article published on CERN’s e-publishing website.

CERN technical students organised the AGH Space Systems X CERN Idea Square cooperation summary conference to present their award-winning atmospheric probe, built as part of a NASA competition.

Last year the four students, from AGH University of Science and Technology in Krakow, Poland entered the international CanSat Competition organised by NASA, the American Astronomy Society (AAS) and the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) in Texas.

The competition asked teams to design, prototype, build, test and launch an atmospheric probe and simulate a mission landing on Mars For the final of the competition the team travelled to Texas where, after 72 hours of continuous work, judges awarded them with fifth place out of 57 teams from around the world.

“We felt like doing something more than hanging out in Geneva after work, and decided to start out ambitious project,” explains Jakub Rachucki, one of the team. “After this great adventure, proud and tired, we were ready to come back to CERN. To share our story and promote both IdeaSquare and AGH, so we organised our conference, where not only the atmospheric probe was presented, but also our rockets, Mars rover and atmospheric balloon equipment.”

Whilst working on the project the students entered into an 8-month-long cooperation between AGH Space Systems (their design society) and CERN’s IdeaSquare, who allowed the group use of their workshop and tools. The project fits with IdeaSquare’s philosophy of bringing people together to come up with new ideas that are useful for society.

“Think it sounds pretty easy, huh? But not only was it supposed to hit the ground like a stone, then glide in a circular pattern within a 1000 metre diameter. In addition, it had to sample the atmosphere and communicate with the ground station in real time. It was also taking pictures and transmitting them via radio. And by the way, all of it weighed 250g and was enclosed in a can-shaped 25cm by 12cm container,” Weronika Mrozinska continues.

The students already had some experience with this competition after they took part last year and won.

They were also the only Polish team in the competition and came top of all the European teams.