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second IEEE NPSS conference of 2009 will be the 16th International
Real Time Conference (RT2009). It will be hosted by the Institute
of High Energy Physics (IHEP) in Beijing, China, from May 10 to
May 15, 2009. The general chair is Professor Yifang Wang, from IHEP,
assisted by co-chair Professor Yantai Shu, from the Tianjing University
(TJU). The chair of the local organization committee is Professor
Zhen’An Liu, from IHEP.
This is the first time that an NPSS conference will be held in mainland
China and it will be a very exciting experience. Following the tradition
of RT2007 (Fermilab) and RT2005 (Stockholm, Sweden), the conference
will be institute based, with all the activities centered at IHEP.
The institute is located about 12 km west of downtown Beijing, with
direct access by subway. There is a Holiday-Inn hotel within walking
distance of the institute, and the institute also operates a guest
house on the site. It takes about half an hour to travel from the
institute to Tiananmen Square by subway, and it costs $0.30. Also,
taxis are very inexpensive in Beijing and are probably the most
convenient means of transportation. They are numerous and can be
hailed on the street. A ride to downtown will cost about $5.00.
In general, the drivers speak only Chinese, so it is always a good
idea to have your destination written with Chinese characters on
a card. Renting a car is definitely not a good idea. The driving
style in Beijing is bewildering to say the least, for nonlocals.
As usual, all the presentations at the conference will be plenary.
This is made possible by the small size of the conference and favors
the exchange of ideas between researchers from various fields, who
quite frequently face similar experimental problems. The fields
covered are rather broad: ultrafast timing, front end signal processing,
real-time systems architecture, trigger/DAQ, event building, control
and monitoring, online farms and databases, and new standards. These
methods are common to many disciplines, such as plasma, nuclear
and particle physics, astrophysics, space science, accelerators,
medicine and biology.
The conference will open on Sunday, May 10, with one full day of
workshops and tutorials. During the week, the first talk of each
day will be in the form of a “refresher course.” This
is to take into account the large audience of students that traditionally
attend the RT conference. We will also continue with the concept
of “mini-oral” poster presentations. They proved very
successful at RT2005 and RT2007. The “mini-oral” is
a 3- minutes /3-slides “publicity spot” where the author
can highlight in a plenary session the work presented on his or
her poster.
Travelling to China is now much simpler than it used to be. The
Olympic games brought incredible improvements in the infrastructure
of the Beijing area. Nevertheless, there are visa procedures to
follow, and the time required to obtain a visa varies from country
to country. Allow yourself enough time to get your visa without
worry.
Further details about the conference are available on the web site
at: http://www.ihep.ac.cn/english/conference/rt2009/
or by asking Google for RT2009
Jean-Pierre Martin, chair of the Computer Applications in Nuclear
and Plasma Science Technical Committee, the NPSS sponsor of the
Real Time conferences, can be reached at the University of Montreal,
RJA Lévesque Laboratory, Montreal (QC), Canada H3C 3J7. Phone
+1 514 343 7340; e-mail: jpmartin@lps.umontreal.ca
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