One year of ePIXnet

1
One year of ePIXnet

• Roel Baets

2
September 2004

• Kick-off meeting
• Ghent, 70 attendees
• Steering committee installed
• General Assembly decisions about major budget
  allocation
• 1000 kEuro allocated to partners
• 500 kEuro in central pot
• All activities launched
• 32 partners (44 research groups), 13 affiliate
  partners
• 5 Facility Access Activities (FAAs), each with a
  responsible coordinator (AC)
• 9 Joint Research Activities (JRAs), each with a
  responsible coordinator (AC)
• Junior Researcher Exchange (JRE) Program
• Senior Staff Exchange Program (SSE)
• Gender action plan
• Education activities
• Dissemination activities
• Industrial affiliation
• Management and Administration

3
October 2004

• Consortium agreement
• Finalized version sent out for signature
• All 35 signatures being collected in the next
  three months
• Deliverable 1.1
• First guidelines and recommendations for
  integration of research to all Facility Access
  Activities and Joint Research Activities
• Junior Researcher Exchange starts to happen
• First Pascual Muñoz (UPVLC-OGC -gt COBRA OED)
• 30 more will follow during year 1

4
November 2004

• First call for requests from consumable budget
  (central pot)
• Every three months a new call will follow with
  subsequent decisions and budget reallocations
• Consumable budget 262 kEuro
  Allocated 229 kEuro

5
December 2004

• Month 3 deliverables!!!!
• All activities (FAAs and JRAs) define their
  targets
• Research targets
• Integration targets
• Several iterations between Activity Coordinators
  and Steering Committee
• Final versions sent to Project Officer on 17
  February
• Money arrives from Brussels!

6
January 2005

• ePIXnet website
• existed since start of project
• public part, partner-only part, AC-only part,
  NC-only part
• continuous improvements
• on-line forms for various requests and their
  follow-up
• our credo
• make life easy (information is in one place)
• make life transparant (information is available)

• Screen shot of website

7
February 2005

• Activity Coordinators Meeting in Brussels
• All 14 activity coordinators present their status
  of work
• Discussions about problems encountered
• Overall feeling the network is up and running

8
March 2005

• Preparation of 6-monthly report -(
• Thomas Krauss and Rama Raj commit to organizing
  the first ePIXnet winter school on Photonic
  Integration (March 2006, Switzerland) -) 
• Senior Staff Exchange request
• Anand Srinivasan (KTH -gt CNRS-LPN)
• But SSE turned out to be much less popular than
  expected. Why??

9
April 2005

• Gender meeting
• Thanks to Silke Schön and Ursula Keller (ETHz)
• 20 ePIXnet female researchers
• They made an impressive gender action plan
• and they made fun
• ECIO-Grenoble
• 2 ePIXnet tutorial lectures (Fiore and
  Viktorovitch)
• First ePIXnet publications

10
May 2005

• Dissemination ePIXnet presentations at
• EuroTaiwan (28/4/2005) Herbert Venghaus
• OPTRO Paris (9/5/2005) Roel Baets
• The heroic struggle about audit certificates
  starts

11
June 2005

• New affiliate partners
• IFN Roma
• NTNU Taiwan
• More will follow after this annual meeting
• Education
• Two Erasmus Mundus proposals submitted by subsets
  of ePIXnet partners

12
July 2005

• Start organisation of Network Annual Meeting
• Engineering the program to make it a useful and
  relevant meeting
• Mike Wale takes the lead for organising an
  Industrial Workshop

13
August 2005

• Take some holidays
• (except Lieven)
• Continue organisation of Network Annual Meeting
• Invite high-level speakers
• Invite /- 35 companies to attend the meeting
  (and to consider affiliate membership)

14
Conclusions

• We are largely on schedule
• Activity Coordinators and Steering Committee are
  doing a great job
• We start to arouse a lot of interest
• In industry
• Outside Europe
• We have successfully taken a first important
  step towards durable integration
• We are an excellent Network of Excellence