This autumn, CERN openlab took the opportunity to participate in the Intel European Research and Innovation Conference (ERIC) 2012 in Barcelona. The main themes were focused on smart societies enabled by research and innovation partnerships, following the guidelines of EU’s Europe 2020 agenda. The Barcelona event was the fifth one of its kind, organized by Intel Labs and its Barcelona division, which was celebrating its 10^th year anniversary. The highlight talk was delivered by Intel’s CTO and the head of Intel Labs Justin Rattner, who gave a thought-provoking account of Intel’s internal innovation processes and a take on what makes innovative ideas successful. Martin Curley, director of Intel Labs Europe, presented Intel’s research goals for the next decade and the progress made towards attaining them. Other keynote guests were speakers linked to European science - CERN’s Andrzej Nowak amongst them.

Andrzej, representing the CERN openlab Platform Competence Centre, delivered one of the keynotes, entitled “Collaboration, Big Data and the search for the Higgs Boson”. His speech focused on the collaborative challenge that research at CERN is and the mountain of data that LHC’s experiments produce and successfully analyze using the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid. A very hot topic was this year’s news of the observation of a new Higgs-like particle, which could be confirmed as the discovery of the long-sought missing element of the standard model.