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 analysing 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 kilometres to form terrestrial telescopes. Although different in size, both cases have very similar needs to handle the information that they gather and supply. That’s 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 Positron Emission Tomography in detectors medical applications
The large terrestrial telescope array data system, made of numerous detectors spread over kilometres
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.
INFIERI, in the 2013-2017 period, from February 1st 2013, will provide several job positions to work and be trained on the topics tackled by the project and in an exciting research network.
A wide range of training activities are covered both at a local level and network-wide, through the most modern media communication technologies and the excellent educational level offered by universities, research centres and industrial partners.
In order to achieve their Research & Training goals, the INFIERI network activities have been organized into nine work packages.
The network includes 11 full partners with a leading role in their own field: 5 academic nodes, 4 European Labs, and 2 companies. International associated partners in Europe, the USA and Korea 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 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