Endorsed in June 2016 by the Management, the CERN Alumni Project has the wind in its sails and will be officially launched in June this year. Twenty project team members, from the departments and large collaborations, have contributed to the design of the programme, which was approved with the full support of the Director-General and the Enlarged Directorate in October, and which takes into account the challenges and complexities involved in building a brand new community. “We are working on providing an attractive and unique offer to our Alumni from day one,” explains Laure Esteveny, CERN Alumni Project Leader. “We aim at gathering a large number of members, whether they are former colleagues still working in academia, or who have set up their own businesses, or who have moved into completely different professional environments.”

The new programme targets a potential audience of over 10 000 people. Former users, associates, students, fellows, staff or anyone else who has held a contract, either of employment or association, with CERN may join the Alumni community by registering for the programme. Current members of personnel will also be able to register and interact with the alumni. Once a new web platform is launched in June, members of the CERN Alumni community will have access to exclusive professional learning opportunities and dedicated editorial content, as well as opportunities to exchange experiences and establish contacts with other members. “We want to build a very inclusive community, primarily based on the pride of having contributed to CERN’s scientific endeavours and providing an opportunity to maintain a link with the Organization, keep sharing its values and supporting its activities,” says Laure. “The new platform will provide a secure environment for the living network to create new connections. We hope to make it the primary channel for members to stay engaged with CERN. From computing related issues to communication, training, special offers, events and even volunteering opportunities… we have really tried to deal with all aspects related to establishing a unique High-Energy Network!”

Although the new site will only be available in about six months’ time, it is already possible to express an interest in becoming a member of the CERN Alumni Network by registering at alumni.cern or on the dedicated LinkedIn page. Over the coming months, the Office for Alumni Relations will keep those registered up-to-date with progress made until the actual launch. If you wish to start (or renew?) your life-long connection with CERN, get in touch!

What are the top issues on the global science agenda and how will they be addressed in the year ahead? Fabiola Gianotti, CERN’s Director-General, will speak as part of a panel addressing these questions tomorrow, 20 January, at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting.

On the panel:

• Philip Campbell – Editor-in-Chief, Nature, United Kingdom
• Fabiola Gianotti, Director-General, European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), Geneva
• Marc N. Casper, President and Chief Executive Officer, Thermo Fisher Scientific, USA
• France A. Córdova, Director, National Science Foundation (NSF), USA
• Ameenah Gurib-Fakim, President of the Republic of Mauritius
• Sung-Mo Steve Kang, President, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), Republic of Korea

You can watch the webcast live on this page from 09.15 CET Friday, 20 January 2017:

Find out how else you can follow the Davos summit here.

Iot at CERN? That’s the Internet-of-Things (IoT) here at CERN, e.g. any random device, not necessarily PCs, laptops, tablets or smartphones, connected to CERN’s General Purpose Network (GPN) – the GPN-of-Things! And why a treasure trove? The Internet-of-Things is known to be unsecured, unprotected and full of vulnerabilities (see for example "Our life in symbiosis", “Your car, my control”, or “Hacking Control Systems, Switching Lights Off!”). The same goes for the devices connected to the GPN: unsecured and unprotected, a playground for hackers and attackers!

At the end of 2016, we performed an in-depth security scan of the CERN GPN*. Unlike before, when the targets had been laptops, PCs, tablets and smartphones, this time we aimed our scan at the “unusual” devices: embedded controllers, web cameras, control systems and any other box with an Ethernet connection. We found an abundance: voltmeters, television screens, oscilloscopes, programmable logic controllers (PLCs), Ethernet-to-whatever converters and power supplies. In addition to this were many private printers, network switches, wireless access points and VoIP phones, despite the fact that the CERN IT department provides central services for networking, telephony and printing. So far, so interesting. But it got worse: many of these devices were using default passwords (“admin:admin” anyone?). Others were running outdated firmware versions allowing attackers to crack the password easily or even bypass the authentication step completely…

So, if you own an embedded device and if you care that this device is functioning properly, make sure that its security posture is up-to-date: replace any default passwords with your own dedicated passwords. Follow the CERN password rules for this. Also, make sure that the firmware is the most recent version. Some of the devices found by us flagged that their current firmware was outdated and that a more recent version was ready for download! If a device is essential for your experiment or one of CERN’s accelerators, refrain from connecting it to the GPN. Instead, check with your experiment or the Technical Network administrators whether your device is a good candidate to be connected there (or to find out about other alternatives)…

*No, the CERN Computing Rules do not allow you to run such scans yourself. Thus, please refrain from doing so.

Do you want to learn more about computer security incidents and issues at CERN? Follow our Monthly Report. For further information, questions or help, check our website or contact us at Computer.Security@cern.ch.

In December 2016, CERN staff members went to Kumasi, Ghana, to introduce the Invenio digital library software developed at CERN to librarians and IT specialists. Thirty participants from eight different African countries gathered for the week-long training course.

A follow-up week offering about six participants of the Kumasi school advanced training on digital libraries will also take place at CERN during spring 2017. The purpose of the school is to deepen participants’ understanding of digital libraries, expose new trends in scientific publishing and emphasise a set of principles related to open access to both data and publications, which is crucial to promoting open science.

This is not the first time the CERN & Society Foundation has partnered on projects in Ghana. In 2012, CERN donated 220 decommissioned servers and 30 routers to the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST). These servers are now being used at the National Institute of Mathematical Sciences, NIMS, hosted at KNUST, a facility partly financed by the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.

CERN’s Data Centre contains around 10 000 computers that need to be upgraded every four to five years. Once decommissioned, these computers, although obsolete for CERN’s cutting-edge research purposes, are still suitable for less demanding applications and can be donated to other institutes.

The CERN-UNESCO School for Digital Libraries is a CERN & Society project and the 2016 school in Ghana was made possible thanks to a generous donation made by Ms Margarita Louis-Dreyfus.

To learn more about the CERN & Society Foundation’s activities and how you can be involved, visit the dedicated page.

Since the beginning of December, hundreds of people from CERN’s technical teams have been working to repair and upgrade many facilities across the whole accelerator chain and on the experiments. This year’s technical stop, referred to as an extended year-end technical stop (EYETS), will be exceptionally long as it will last until the end of April. These additional weeks will allow critical, time-consuming work such as the upgrade of the CMS pixel detector to take place. 

Before the EYETS started, ten days were dedicated to powering tests to train the magnets of two LHC sectors. The current was gradually increased in the magnets of both sectors up to 11 535 amperes in sector 4-5, corresponding to an energy of 6.82 TeV.

During the EYETS, three main categories of activities are being carried out: maintenance of many systems (cryogenics, cooling and ventilation, vacuum, electrical systems, etc.); work to prepare the machine and the injectors for the HL-LHC upgrade; and consolidation work and other activities such as the replacement of the 12 lifts along the LHC ring.

The whole LHC has been emptied of liquid helium, to avoid wasting any of the precious gas in the event of unexpected electrical failures during the operations. It also allows the technical teams to perform a lot of maintenance work on the cryogenic system. Since the entire operation of refilling, pumping and boiling off will then take several weeks, the schedule of the EYETS operations – already quite busy – gets really tight. The cryo-filling of the first sector is scheduled to take place between the end of February and the beginning of March.

Another major activity is the replacement of a magnet in sector 1-2. During the Christmas break, the sector was warmed up and several electric quality tests and helium-insulation-tightness tests at ambient temperature were successfully performed, revealing no major issues. One of the major risks of warming up a sector is the deformation of the bellows that hold together the different parts of the cryogenic distribution line. X-rays have been performed on all 250 bellows, revealing no deformation. The ball test has also been carried out and no faults were found on the plug-in modules of the sector.  

As regards the injectors, the main activities are on the Proton Synchrotron Booster and Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS). The critical activities for the Booster are related to the de-cabling and cabling campaign – the identification and removal of all unnecessary cables to make room for the new cables needed for the LHC Injector Upgrade (LIU) project. Moreover, all the infrastructure needed for the HL-LHC in the Booster’s surface areas are being installed also as part of the LIU project.

For the SPS, aside from the de-cabling and cabling campaign, the main activities concern the installation of the cryogenics module and related infrastructure for the HL-LHC superconducting crab cavities, and work to replace an internal dump (TIDVG). This dump’s malfunctioning limited the number of bunches that could be injected from the SPS into the LHC last year, so it needed to be replaced.

The EYETS schedule is quite tight but everything is proceeding well for now, without any major disruptions. So far, so good! 

On 19 January 2017, Roberto Saban, now retired after having served as the head of CERN’s Engineering department from 2010 to 2016, was bestowed with the title of Commander of the Italian Republic (Commendatore Ordine al Merito della Repubblica Italiana) at an official ceremony held at the Italian mission in Geneva.

The aim of the SHiP (Search for Hidden Particles) experiment, a proposed project currently being studied by CERN’s Physics Beyond Colliders (PBC) group, is to search directly for hidden particles that could explain certain beyond-Standard-Model phenomena. If approved, SHiP will use 400-GeV beams from the Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS), which will be directed at a fixed target at the end of a 1-kilometre beam transfer line.

However, to have any chance of identifying the hidden particles, the researchers have to control the background noise generated when the beam hits the target. Slow extraction of the beam from the SPS achieves this by significantly reducing the number of protons that hit the target each second.

The standard slow-extraction method is known as “resonant extraction”. It allows the production of long spills lasting for seconds in the extraction line. This is done using extraction sextupoles that cause the particles in the beam to move in an unstable but controlled way. An electrostatic septum then catches the most unstable protons and deflects them towards the extraction line.

Unfortunately, this method has one major and unavoidable drawback: a small but significant amount of beam is lost during the extraction. The SHiP experiment requires no fewer than 4 x 10¹⁹ protons on target per year, which can only be achieved by reducing these beam losses by a factor of four. “Most beam losses occur on the electrostatic septum,” explains Brennan Goddard, TE-ABT (Accelerator Beam Transfer) group leader. “Reducing the transverse beam density upstream of the septum is a promising technique for minimising these losses, but, up until now, we haven’t been able to meet the requirements for SHiP with the tools available.”

The TE/ABT group, in close collaboration with the UA9 collaboration and the BE/OP and EN-STI groups, has been investigating the possibility of using a tool already used by UA9 for the LHC collimation project: a bent silicon crystal. When placed upstream of the septum, this crystal channels the beam very effectively, resulting in significantly reduced beam losses. “In 2016, we carried out the first tests with a 2-mm-long silicon crystal. In November, we successfully completed a slow-extracted spill, lasting many minutes, of a very-low-intensity 270-GeV beam into the TT20 transfer line,” Goddard explains.“The next steps will be to quantify the beam losses at higher intensities and develop crystals better suited to the extraction process.”

To this end, further studies and tests will be carried out in the SPS in 2017 and 2018.  If the tests are successful, it will be excellent news not only for SHiP but also for other CERN facilities that could make use of the technology.

For more information about the SHiP experiment, see this article published in issue 28-29/2015 of the CERN Bulletin.

At the end of 2016, CERN’s five technical apprentices from the 2012-2016 year group were awarded their certificat fédéral de capacité (CFC). After four years at CERN, the two physics laboratory technicians, Nikkita Bersan and Roland Hirt, and the three electronics technicians, Ioana Novas, Diego Padin and Yann Anthonnet, left the Laboratory with their heads held high. We congratulate them on their achievements!

Roland Hirt and Yann Anthonnet were also awarded the 2016 Union industrielle genevoise (UIG) prize for their excellent academic results. The prizes were presented on 6 December at the Office de promotion des industries et des technologies (Switzerland) in the presence of Pierre Maudet, Geneva state councillor.

In September 2016, four new apprentices – three electronics technicians and one physics laboratory technician – joined the Laboratory. CERN’s apprenticeship programme, which has been running since the 1960s, welcomes new students every year and has already enabled many young apprentices to obtain their CFC in the framework of a sandwich course.

On Thursday, 2 March, the Pathé cinema at Balexert, in collaboration with CERN, will be hosting a premiere of the film Hidden Figures, followed by a debate on the position of women in science.

Hidden Figures tells the story of three African-American female scientists who played key roles in the United States’ space conquest, contributing in particular to the preparations for putting astronaut John Glenn into orbit.

The story of these women, who were overshadowed by their male colleagues in an era of deeply ingrained inequality, is finally brought to the screen having been left untold for many years.

This true story reminds us that women and minority groups are still largely under-represented in scientific research. Why is that? How has the situation changed in recent years? What steps have been taken to tackle the issue? And where are we now?

Female CERN scientists from different backgrounds will talk about their experiences and give their perspective on the subject during a debate after the screening led by Tania Chytil, science reporter for RTS. Don’t miss the chance to share your views with these exceptional women!

________________________

Film screening in English at 8.30 p.m., debate at 10.30 p.m.

Venue: Pathé cinema, Balexert, Avenue Louis-Casaï 27, 1211 Geneva

Standard ticket prices (including one free drink for each audience member).

The film’s general release date in Switzerland is 8 March 2017. Watch the trailer. 

Today, “links” are the main threat to your operating system and, consequently, to your professional and private data. With one single “click”, an attacker can compromise your device and start snooping on your life. While we still rely on you to click with care (remember – “Stop – Think –Don’t click”), the CERN IT department is preparing additional measures for your protection.

Indeed, malicious links or URLs embedded in websites or e-mails, as well as malicious PDFs (attachments or downloads) can take advantage of the inherent vulnerabilities in your operating system – most likely if you are running a Microsoft Windows operating system or have an Android Smartphone, but still possible if you run MacOS, and not fully impossible with Linux or Apple iOS. Following your innocent click on a malicious link, URL or PDF, a well-crafted piece of software is executed that anchors itself in your operating system and clandestinely takes control. With this unfortunate click, the adversary now has access to all your locally stored data. Software. Documents. Photos. Videos. Reading your e-mails. Snapshotting your activities. With your unfortunate click, the adversary might enable your webcam and your microphone. Watching and listening to you. With this momentous click, you are naked. Your life is exposed. And the chances are low that you will even detect it…

Last year, a dedicated clicking campaign using untargeted and irrelevant e-mails to all CERN people resulted in a 20% click-rate. 20%! This means that an attacker would now own up to 20% of CERN PCs… Fortunately, this was part of a campaign we ran to help you understand the risks of clicking (One click and BOOM…). In summer 2015, we weren’t that lucky. A targeted attack, starting with two malicious e-mails, kept the Computer Security Team busy for two months and caused some non-negligible costs for the Organization. Fortunately, given the potential risk, damage was very limited.

In either case, “Stop – Think – Don’t click” is your – and CERN’s! – first line of defence. If you receive e-mails that are not addressed to you, not in a language you usually use, with weird or unrelated content, full of typos, with a sender whose e-mail address looks completely different, take care! This might be such a malicious e-mail (for more details on how to identify malicious emails, click here). But you are not alone. The IT department has recently deployed a dedicated device automatically analysing all our e-mails for such malicious content. The “Fireeye EX” device even simulates user activity trying to trigger any malicious activity in the e-mails sent to us. And since malicious PDFs are one of the main attack routes, plans are currently being made to replace our current solution with a suitable and safe alternative. This would replace a notoriously vulnerable software package with something much less likely to be targeted. Finally, the IT department is currently working on better reinforcing Windows PCs so that they are less susceptible to unfortunate clicks, while making this completely transparent for you. A draft of such guidelines can be found here. But beware, for the moment this is for the experts and for very specific use cases only!

Watch where you “click” to stay secure!

Do you want to learn more about computer security incidents and issues at CERN? Follow our Monthly Report. For further information, questions or help, visit our website or contact us at Computer.Security@cern.ch.

A new Voxxed Days event is coming to CERN on 25 February 2017, and everyone is invited.

Voxxed Days are a series of tech events organised by local community groups and supported by the Voxxed team. Sharing the Devoxx philosophy that content comes first, these events see both internationally renowned and local speakers converge at a wide range of locations around the world.

The Devoxx DNA thrives in Switzerland after brilliant Voxxed Days events in Zurich & Ticino in recent years. Supported by local user groups, Voxxed Days CERN will offer the chance to hear from experts across a range of important topics.

If you’re a developer who’s curiosity is piqued by technological developments around Java, JVM, performance, productivity, web technologies or developer practices, then this is the event for you. We promise an outstanding day filled with amazing content, all at an iconic location.

Speakers include:

• Dr Venkat Subramaniam
• Martin Odersky
• Trisha Gee
• Adam Bien
• Dr Keinz Kabutz
• Simon Maple
• Josh Long
• Audrey Neveu
• Hadi Hariri
• Juergen Hoeller
• Antonio Goncalves

Tickets for the Voxxed Day CERN are on sale now, and you can register at https://tickets.voxxeddays.com/event/cern/.

There are also a limited number of free places available for CERN personnel, which can be obtained through Indico at cern.ch/voxxed.

You can also follow the event on Twitter for further information, @VoxxedCERN.

In physics, as in other sciences, there is often a huge gap between the number of men and women. Just 20% of CERN's community are women, and CERN wants to improve on this. To encourage and attract more women to choose science, particularly physics, as a career CERN is holding events for both Gender in Physics Day and the International Day of Women in Science.

Last week, female scientists working at CERN visited local schools, to try to inspire the next generation of women in science.

35 women who have careers as physicists, engineers and computer scientists at CERN and are fascinated by the world of science, went to speak to the pupils.

The women first introduced the students to CERN, and then explained their everyday work and how they became a part of this huge community. Most importantly, the women described what first interested them about the field.

“My motivation to participate in this programme comes from the fact I am the mother of a 7 year old girl, my sister works in education and I myself love interacting with kids,” explains Marta Bajko, a researcher at CERN. “I personally love to talk about science and hope that I can capture their attention. I had the chance as a kid to be influenced by my mother to choose a scientific career, now it is my turn.”

To mark the International Day of Women and Girls in Science, some of the speakers shared their own experiences of building a career in science, and their opinions about how women are perceived in their discipline. See the series of articles here.

Additionally, on 27 January 2017, over 100 participants gathered for the fourth Gender In Physics day. CERN co-organised the event with ESO and Nordforsk, as part of the GENERA project (Gender Equality Networks in the ERA). The day was a rich, interactive day with a variety of talks, personal insights, a panel discussion and workshops on promoting gender equality and creating solid networks in the field of physics.

The Directors-General of both CERN and ESO, as well as a representative for Nordforsk’s Director, opened the event, which was attended by Directors and participants from other EIRO organisations and from a range of institutes and projects.

Looking back on the day, Genevieve Guinot, Head of the Diversity Programme at CERN and the driving force behind the organisation of the event, reflected: “We are very proud that the event could bring together so many different institutes and organisations that face similar challenges in different contexts. Participants gave us the feedback that the event was inspirational, with a great opportunity to network and discuss ideas. CERN was perceived as a role model for building collaboration in the field of gender equality.”

Many facilities across the accelerators chain are being repaired and upgraded since the second week of December 2016, as soon as the LHC operations were stopped. But this year's extended year-end technical stop (EYETS) is also an opportunity for the experiment collaborations to perform prolonged maintenance activities and preparatory works for the HL-LHC upgrade on their detectors.

ALICE

Diverse, delicate and time-consuming maintenance activities are being carried out on the ALICE detectors, especially on the electronic equipment and services, such as cooling, ventilation and electricity. Some of the electronic boards of the time-of-flight detector and the photon spectrometer will be replaced, and other minor work will be performed on the electronics and mechanics of the two calorimeters.

The gas of the time projection chamber (TPC) will be changed in an attempt to reduce the distortions that are currently affecting the TPC data and that require complex correction algorithms. At the same time, different prototypes of optical fibres necessary for the HL-LHC upgrade are being installed and will be tested during the next operation period. The commissioning of all ALICE's different detectors is foreseen for the end of March.

ATLAS

At Point 1, the ATLAS detector has been fully opened, and all sub-detectors are now accessible for maintenance. The EYETS started with repairs to the calorimeter cooling and power supplies that had some issues in 2016. Moreover, the data acquisition systems of several ATLAS sub-detector systems are being upgraded, in order to cope with the higher instantaneous luminosities and pile-up expected in 2017.

The installation of additional small muon chambers has started: as an extension of the ATLAS muon spectrometer, they will provide a rate capability an order of magnitude higher, and they can be installed in detector regions where regular muon chambers do not fit.

Finally, the installation of the second arm of the ATLAS Forward Proton (AFP) is well under way: this will complete the AFP, which saw its first arm installed in the 2015/2016 YETS. The AFP project promises a significant extension to the physics reach of ATLAS by tagging and measuring the momentum and emission angle of very forward protons.

LHCb

At LHCb, the maintenance period for work on the detectors was shrunk to a minimum this year because of the replacement of the lift and the revamping of the overhead cranes. Five weeks in total were available to perform all the regular checks, repairs and maintenance on the detectors. The large calorimeter detectors were opened for just enough time to perform the necessary work, before wrapping the LHCb detector in an envelope aiming to protect the detectors during the heavy work using the lift and cranes.

In addition, exceptional work was performed on the ring imaging Cherenkov detector and the tracker in front of the dipole. The Cherenkov detector was opened and brought down to the pit floor to exchange a few photon detectors and some front-end electronics parts. The tracker's modules were shipped to Zurich to repair a few broken bonds and reinstalled the following week.

In the next issue of the Bulletin for the CERN Communitywe will report on the EYETS activities on the CMS detector.

The International Particle Physics Outreach Group (IPPOG) has recently (on 19 December 2016) been made into a formal collaboration.

Established 20 years ago, IPPOG has evolved from a European to a global network of members, which can include countries, laboratories and research collaborations, all with the aim of making a concerted effort to popularize particle physics.

The new collaboration status demonstrates a clear commitment towards sustainable and systematic science outreach. Already IPPOG has 13 official members who signed the memorandum of understanding, and contribute a membership fee, with more expected to join soon.

Read more about what this new status means, and IPPOG’s history here.

For the convenience of everyone at CERN, public PC terminals are provided in many different locations so that people can access CERN’s websites, as well as CERN’s other computing services, even if they do not have a computer/tablet/smartphone to hand. PC terminals are available in the CERN library, in front of the Users’ Office, and also for dedicated purposes in conference rooms and the training centre. However, note what they are: public PCs, located in public places.

In the past few months, we have received several complaints about inappropriate use of some of these public PCs, namely the browsing of pornographic material. To our knowledge, there is no professional need to access such websites, and therefore the browsing of pornographic images and films is in violation of the CERN Computing Rules and the personal use policy. Worse, these activities took place in public places where others, by-standers and passers-by, including school pupils and young children, might accidentally notice it – and feel embarrassed or seriously offended! This is why we got the complaints in the first instance.

So, if you happen to use one of CERN’s public PCs, please stick to the rules. Spare yourself the embarrassment of a third party seeing what you are doing (and spare yourself the embarrassment of getting a notification from us). This not only applies to browsing pornographic material, but also doing other private things: internet banking, following your friends on Facebook, reading your e-mails. Of course, this is also true for laptops and tablets used in public places like the restaurants and cafeterias. Browsing pornographic material on an office PC is also in violation of the CERN Computing Rules and we would appreciate it if private activities could remain in the private sphere: at home.

Do you want to learn more about computer security incidents and issues at CERN? Follow our Monthly Report. For further information, questions or help, visit our website or contact us at Computer.Security@cern.ch.

It’s a typical, cloudy February morning on CERN’s Meyrin site. After hours spent hunched over your computer, a quick glance at the clock tells you it’s 12 p.m. – almost time for lunch. You frown as you imagine the chaotic, heaving crowds in R1, the long lines and the hunt for a free seat. You decide to spare yourself the trouble and stay at your desk.

But, is that the most exciting, relaxing or productive way to spend your lunch break? Wouldn’t it be better if you could meet new friends and potentially build new projects instead?

Enter LunchCollider, a project that you register for in the morning and then an algorithm selects a random person with whom you meet for lunch. This social project has been built for the CERN community and is designed to encourage us to create friendships, build on ideas and share knowledge.

“We would be extremely happy if new CERN projects or new physics theories came to life thanks to LunchCollider,” says Mietek Dabrowski, one of the founders of LunchCollider.  

“Recently I had lunch with a person I’ve never met before. I had no idea who this person was, no idea where they came from, and no idea what they did at CERN,” says one participant after their first experience of using LunchCollider. “But one hour and fifteen minutes passed very quickly. The list of topics we wanted to talk about, from our home countries to how we ended up at CERN, was long! Now we have to go back to work. That was an amazing experience; I’ll do it again. Hopefully at 12 p.m. on Wednesday next week.”

The lunch sessions are organised twice a week – either on Tuesdays and Thursdays or Wednesdays and Fridays. Between 8.30 and 11.30 a.m., you register for a lunch session on the website, where you also choose to meet with either one or two people. At 11.45 a.m., you receive an e-mail with the names of your lunch buddies and instructions on where to meet them. The time and place are fixed – 12 noon in Restaurant 1.

LunchCollider was launched in October last year and already has 150 subscribers. Its creators are Mietek Dabrowski, Piotr Nikiel, Roberto Campesato and Esther Zanon. “We were bound together by a common vision,” explains Piotr. “What if, in such a diverse and heterogeneous place like CERN, everyone could seamlessly exchange knowledge, ideas and interests with everybody else?”

The creators’ hope to build not only friendships but also professional networks – places to seek and receive information.

“We understand that meeting strangers might be a bit frightening, but we want to fight that fear. Some people have admitted that they are slightly nervous before the meeting – they worry that the conversation won’t flow smoothly. This never turns out to be the case and, in the end, everybody enjoys it,” says Roberto.

The concept of meeting kind, smiling, albeit slightly nervous, new people over lunch is certainly refreshing. Besides physics, engineering and programming, the number of topics you can talk about is limitless – culture, arts, sports, politics, and anything else you might think of.

Try it for yourself: all you have to do is to register at LunchCollider.ch.

A key challenge in designing a future collider like those being explored as part of the FCC study is ensuring that the operation of such a complex technical infrastructure remains reliable and affordable.

To meet these challenges, CERN has recently signed an R&D agreement with Ramentor Oy, a high-tech company based in Tampere, Finland. In a three-year project, engineers from CERN, Ramentor and other institutes participating in the Future Circular Collider study will develop a tool to assess the effectiveness of different designs and operation schedules for large technical systems.

At first, this tool will be used to create a model of LHC and injector operations that can be validated using actual LHC operation data. This model will then be used directly as additional aid to verify the operation concepts for the High-Luminosity LHC upgrade. It will also be used to develop and refine system behaviour models, and explore a large set of different operation scenarios using a cloud-based setup. Indeed, today, simulating a ten-year LHC operation requires roughly up to an hour. One way of reducing this time is to divide the problem into manageable chunks for cloud computing, and this approach will be taken in the new system.

More specifically, the new tool integrates industry best-practices into model systems and run simulations that take into account the present condition and history of a facility. The simulation considers operation schedules ranging from seconds or months up to the entire lifespan of a facility.

In addition, the new tool will offer users an interactive experience, allowing engineers to receive instantaneous feedback about the performance and operation costs. The user-friendly software ensures that this doesn’t require advanced programming skills.

Such a modelling and simulation ecosystem can also provide benefits for similar large-scale research infrastructures, including particle accelerators and telescope arrays. Since the models, parameters and assessment results will be available in an open data format, the approach will enhance the sharing of knowledge in our community.

This development has already raised interest among leading energy providers: in an effort to make efficient use of resources, this tool will help us to design energy-efficient industrial plants and pinpoint elements in existing industrial installations with the highest potential for cost-effective efficiency improvements.

The project also has significant training value. So far, two doctoral students are actively contributing to this endeavour. The method and tool are now also included in reliability training at CERN, and the activity remains open for further students and collaborators to join.

For more information, visit the FCC website.

This week the CMS collaboration is replacing the heart of its detector: its tracking system. The system determines the trajectories of charged particles and it is made of two components, the Pixel Tracker and the Strip Tracker.

The Pixel Tracker is being replaced with a brand-new one: its upgrade is among the most important EYETS activities for CMS and another feather in the cap of a busy but productive period for the collaboration.

The second-generation Pixel Tracker will operate until the early stages of the High-Luminosity LHC, when it will itself be replaced with a third-generation device.

With the replacement happening throughout the week, more news to come.

For more pictures, visit this page.

Do you like listening to music while you work? What about watching videos during your leisure time at CERN? Sure this is fun. Having your colleagues participate in this is even more fun. However, this fun is usually not free. There are artists and the music and movie companies who earn their living from music and videos.

Thus, if you want to listen to music or watch movies at CERN, make sure that you own the proper rights to do so (and that you have the agreement of your supervisor to do this during working hours). Note that these rights are personal: you usually do not have the right to share music or videos with third parties without violating copyrights. Therefore, making copyrighted music and videos public, or sharing music and videos as well as other copyrighted material, is forbidden at CERN and outside CERN. It violates the CERN Computing Rules and it contradicts CERN's Code of Conduct, which expects each of us to behave ethically and honestly, and to credit others for their contribution. Copyright violation is also illegal in different ways in different European and other countries, including in two CERN host states.

Violating copyright is not a trivial offense. Sharing music or videos via the CERN network or from CERN computers will reflect back on the Organization and shed a bad light on all of us. Therefore, help keep CERN's reputation and integrity protected. Respect copyright! Users violating these rules may face serious consequences, including the involvement of their supervisor and, if applicable, the payment of any (financial) compensation as CERN will waive any costs of the infraction.

Do you want to learn more about computer security incidents and issues at CERN? Follow our Monthly Report. For further information, questions or help, visit our website or contact us at Computer.Security@cern.ch.

The challenge: write a white paper, research paper or grant application in less than 60 hours. The Science Hackathon 2017 was open to every scientist struggling with a particular problem or anyone who wanted to offer their skills to help others with their research problem. What was the outcome? Automated construction of network maps for refugee simulations, forecasting for the reception of Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs), machine learning to predict suicidal behaviour, and ways to keep cars cool are just some of the topics that came out of this year’s Science Hackathon.

Special guest Derek Groen, the organiser of the first ever science hackathon, travelled from London to participate in the event and to speak about his experience. Groen’s presentation shed light on the common challenges faced by hackathon participants.

Below are some of the highlights of the event.

Davide Alocci, Diana Suleimenova and Joao Campos proposed an automated tool that would construct network maps of all points, paths and refugee camps available for simulations of refugee movements. The tool would provide information to governments and organisations such as the UNHCR about where refugees go and how to allocate humanitarian resources.

Derek Groen, Eric Bosne and Gerardo Guillermo drafted a paper on forecasting for IDP reception after a disaster. According to the group’s agent-based model, each family would make decisions based on a set of rules, such as the location of conflicts, the distance between cities and the location of friends or relatives. Training and verification during the weekend with actual data from UNHCR showed good agreement for some parameters in the initial phase of the simulation and also allowed the group to specify which additional data from UNHCR could help to improve the simulation’s predictions.

There are existing studies on the use of machine learning to predict suicidal behaviour from data generated through social media. Achintya Rao, Daniel Dobos and Lorena Lobato instead proposed a series of “wellness check-ins” that people around the world would anonymously complete in order to produce a model based on differential equations. The tool would rate depression from the point of view of the users, rather than relying on expert input.

During the summer months, when temperatures reach over 30°C, cars may overheat, causing burns, dehydration and other harmful effects. Khurram Shahzad, Oday Darwich and Sameed Muhammed drafted a grant proposal for a device that would address this issue. The device would automatically cover the car with a heat-resistant material at the flip of a switch. An app would also allow the user to monitor the temperature of their car remotely.

All the groups plan to take their projects further by publishing journal articles or applying for grants.

What’s next?

The call for challenges is now open for the 2017 THE Port Humanitarian Hackathon. The big event will take place from 6 to 8 October. Go to www.theport.ch and submit a challenge before 31 March.

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