Oct 17 – 21, 2016
LPC, Fermilab
US/Central timezone

INtelligent, Fast, Interconnected and Efficient devices for Frontier Exploitation in Research and Industry (INFIERI)


INFIERI is an inter-disciplinary and multi-national network of research centers aimed to train young physicists and engineers in developing, designing and managing intelligent devices and tools for cutting-edge applications in fundamental physics research and its technological spin-offs.

Astrophysics, Particle Physics, Medical Physics and Telecommunications, in particular, share the need to handle, visualize and interpret data at very high rates from multiple distributed sources. New tools have been recently developed in order to manage the multiple steps needed to treat such huge amounts of data, before analyzing them to bring out scientifically relevant results or high level diagnosis. As a first challenge to be faced, the data sources are not always directly accessible, or are located in very unfriendly environments, can be very close or widely dispersed in space. This is the case of arrays of digital devices, which are assembled to form a medical imaging instrument, but the same happens in case of large arrays of detectors spread over kilometers to form terrestrial telescopes. Although different in size, both cases have very similar needs to handle the information that they gather and supply. That is one of the reasons why challenging technology goals are chased in the context of frontier-research fields.

The INFIERI training program is focused on three specific case histories: the tracking system in the harsh radiation environment of experiments installed in the LHC accelerator at CERN; the novel silicon photomultipliers technology for PET/MRI medical imaging applications; the large terrestrial telescope array data system, made of numerous detectors spread over kilometers (CTA and SKA). In order to achieve cutting edge scientific or technological results, all these fields require an extremely rapid first data processing, a proficient event selection phase, an efficient transmission and a final step of high-level selection of data.

The network includes 11 full partners with a leading role in their own field: 7 Academic nodes, 2 European Labs (NIKHEF and RAL), and 2 leading worldwide companies (PHILIPS and THALES). International associated partners in Europe (among which CERN and CEA-LETI), the USA (FNAL, Purdue University, Tezzaron Semiconductors) and Korea (Seoul National University and Samsung) bring advanced and complementary capabilities. As a highly valuable resource for European industry and academic research, the project will help Europe to maintain its leadership in the forefront of the technologies addressed. The high multi-disciplinary approach will also provide the trainees with unique ways of career development, besides the opportunity to strengthen important research partnerships within Europe. This project has been funded with support from the European Commission under Contract FP7-PEOPLE-2012-317446.

The goals of going to the USA is to make INFIERI partners meeting with their US colleagues at FNAL the Top Fundamental research Center in USA, in this workshop hosted by LPC, where indeed the INFIERI project has been initiated! It will allow valuable face to face exchanges between several top aspects of the Fundamental and Applied research conducted within INFIERI on these two sides of the Atlantic. It will highlight the successful ongoing synergy and collaborations within this EU network with our US colleagues on advanced technological and scientific objectives.

(for a summary of the current achievements of the INFIERI network see as attached material te INFIERI BROCHURE).

The Co-chairs of the 8th INFIERI Workshop: Aurore Savoy Navarro, Petra Merkel, Robert Patti, Matthew Jones

The Local Organizing Committee: Gabriele Benelli (Brown), James Dolen (SUNY Buffalo), Benjamin Kreis (Fermilab), Petra Merkel (Fermilab), Caterina Vernieri (Fermilab), Hannsjoerg Weber (Fermilab)

The LPC Event Committee Chairs: Gabriele Benelli, Nadja Strobbe

The LPC Coordinators: Meenakshi Narain, Boaz Klima