Androulla Vassiliou, the EU Commissioner for Education, Culture, Multilingualism and Youth, visited CERN on Monday, 15 April to meet scientists and researchers supported with funding from the EU Marie Curie Actions.

As part of her visit, Ms Vassiliou gave a speech, in which she highlighted the importance of having academia, research and industry collaborate togethe. The Commisioner specifically mentioned the Intel-CERN European Doctorate Industrial Program (ICE-DIP), which recently kicked-off, and whose technical goal is to research and develop, through a public-private partnership, unparalleled capabilities in the domain of high throughput, low latency, online data acquisition.

“The Marie Curie Actions also help to bring research, universities and businesses together in what we call the 'knowledge triangle'”- said the Commisioner. “In September 2012 the Marie Curie Actions started to fund 20 European Industrial Doctorates, which will last for up to four years. The participants from research enterprises build, in collaboration with a university, a doctoral programme that will bring the researchers to the industrial sector for at least 50% of the duration of their PhD. CERN is hosting one European Industrial Doctorates project called ICE-DIP, in collaboration with Intel. This will focus on advanced information and communication technologies and I am looking forward to seeing the results of this collaboration between such major international players.”

After her talk, the Commissioner met about 30 of the CERN Marie Curie Fellows at posters they had prepared to illustrate their work and training. Andrzej Nowak, one if the ICE-DIP authors, presented a poster showcasing the project. In a short follow-up discussion about ICE-DIP, the main goals and the expected impact were explained to Ms. Vassiliou who was satisfied to hear that such work will help lay the technological foundations for next generation data filtering and analysis, a pre-requisite for other advanced IT activities.

For more information about this visit, please check the EC press release.