This year's event was in Belgrade.
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| View from the Fortress |
The city still has not entirely recovered from the effects of the war over 15 years ago. As we were shuttled downtown for the summary sessions on the last day, we saw some derelict buildings with heavily damaged roofs at the outskirts of the city. Downtown, however, was very nice. There are plenty of options for dining, people were very friendly, and it was extremely easy to communicate in English.
The conference itself was held in two upscale hotels. Attendance was unfortunately not as good as previous workshops, but that did not stop the Serbian President from stopping by our little gathering. The sessions were a mix of plenaries and parallel group meetings. A notable item on the agenda was a session on how to make the ILC physics case. We were reminded on the first day that we should try to strengthen our presentation of the potential for discovery of new phenomena beyond the Standard Model. My colleagues and I believe we have a very strong case, so I guess we need to package it better. If you would like to contribute, post your video to the ILC communicators and let us know if you have suggestions how to present the ILC physics case.
In addition to politics we also did some real work. The reality of having a candidate site was very noticeable at the workshop. Both detectors have to agree on a common interface with the collider, which will lead to some changes in their design. And the design of the campus, including a computing center, is progressing as well. The work on estimating the computing requirements, both, for the proposed campus and off-site, unfortunately distracted me somewhat from carrying out my duties as a session convener. Thanks to my co-conveners, in particular Sophie Redford and Jerome Baudot, for picking up the slack.
The details of the computing will be the subject of a post once we have understood the details a bit better.
