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ACAT'2002 Moscow





Opening session:



Denis Perret-Gallix, CNRS (France)


Chairman of the ACAT International Advisory Committee




Mister Moscow State University Rector, Distinguished guests, Dear
colleagues,
It is a pleasure, as the chairman of the International Advisory Committee,
to be here, today, in Moscow for the opening session of the eighth workshop
on: "Advanced Computing and Analysis Techniques in Physics Research".
This series started back in 1990 in Lyon (France) and, since then, has
traveled in many countries: France, Italy, Germany, Switzerland, Greece,
USA and today in Russia. I am happy to take this opportunity to thank all
the organizers of these meetings who have transformed this workshop into a
truly international event,
and this year, I want to particularly thank:
Professor Viacheslav Ilyin from the Moscow State University and Professor
Vladimir Korenkov from the Joint Institute of Nuclear Research for their
dedication and sustained efforts to make this workshop a reality.

I want also to associate to this acknowledgement Academician Dimitri
Shirkov who has been part of this endeavor since the beginning and who has
played a major role in bringing this event to Russia.

Let me thank the Moscow State University Rector and officials for their
support in opening the doors of this famous and highly praised University
to this event, in this historical building dedicated to Science and
Culture.
Part of the workshop will take place in JINR Dubna and here too I want to
convey my deep thanks to the local organizers.

We are all deeply indebted to our sponsors: RFBR: The Russian Foundation
for Basic Research, INTAS: the European support of the NIS country
scientists and EPS: the European Physics Society.

But I want here to single out our two private company sponsors:
HP and IBM. These companies have long term vision and therefore understand
what is basic research and why, even private companies, should support it.
But I will come back on this latter. Thanks to this support, we have been
able to organize tutorials and the invitation of many Russian researchers.

The goal of this workshop is to discuss all aspects of computing which are
not purely number crunching oriented, . well this is a surprising
definition, because at the end of the day, the only thing computers do is
precisely to number crunch.

What is meant here is that we are all interested in providing some
intelligence look-alike, even a tiny part, to these dumb machines. We are
interested in building the human-machine interface, the tools that make the
computer useful, meaningful for human.


Let's go through the main topics of this workshop.

V Innovative Software Algorithms and Tools:
This includes:
The transformation of complex scientific data in a human tailored
representation:
"a good picture is better than thousand words".
This is Visual Intelligence

It concerns also Software engineering, that is to say, developing and
implementing tools to support the actual writing, the maintenance of
software and eventually make the computer able to write its own programs.
This is Programming Intelligence

V Advanced Statistical Methods for Data Analysis:
This section deals with:
The need to formulate a scientific judgment about the accuracy, the
quality, the "truth" of a computing or an experimental results.
The goal here is to Give sense to numbers

V Simulations and Computations in Theoretical Physics and Phenomenology:

Simulation has become our main tool to interpret the complex output of the
big experiments. It is only by comparing the simulated data and the
measurement that one can pin-point the surging of "new" physics, of a new
phenomenon.
This is learning Intelligence: acquiring Intelligence by mimicking the
world.

But this is also the use of symbolic manipulation languages to provide
compact and error free algebraic solutions. The aim here is Abstraction,
Symbol representation, Abstract Intelligence

V Artificial Intelligence
Artificial intelligence is coming to age. Neural-nets have become a banal
tool nowadays for event selection or triggering (and I think that this
series of workshop has played an important role in that respect). Real-time
expert systems or "Intelligent agents", as one likes to call it today, are
at use in most of the complex experiments.
Evolutionary computing, genetic or "ant" algorithms are also actively
studied.
But the field where AI is being even more in action is robotics, humanoid
robots can walk on their two legs, walkup the stairs, play soccer, sometime
better than some national teams ?!?!? so at least some kind of "reptilian
intelligence" is now implemented. Many more basic studies are actively
pursued, like image, voice and speech recognition, 3D vision,. With no
doubt, these technologies will be implemented in our field soon.

V In Very Large-scale Computing and the GRID,
We are shifting to an even higher level of intelligence, We know that a
group can do better than a single person:
"United we stand, divided we fall",
We know that bees or ants exists only as a society of distributed
intelligence, so here we are talking about social intelligence, which is
the next step in any organized community. The issues here are to build the
tools to properly share the work load between each processing units to
reach the best efficiency and to organize the communication between each
elements.
Should we have a master-slave organization or a more democratic, a more
socialist system, well it is not to me to say, but let's be careful,
because
Computers are human too !!! well . becoming human


But this workshop is more than a mere discussion about new technologies, it
is a unique forum to foster human, face to face communication between
computer scientists and basic science researchers.

Because, for all of us, the final goal of these discussions is to provide
the best support to High-energy physics, Nuclear physics, astrophysics , .
well some kind of Knowledge oriented research, this workshop is therefore a
unique opportunity to demonstrate that Basic science which is sometimes
seen as a mundane activity, a fancy but useless and expensive exercise,
generates a lot of practical activities which can turn rapidly into down-to-
earth applications,
practical activities because they have been triggered by the real needs
facing the researchers in charge of these utterly complex experiments,
probably the most complex human constructions ever.

Basic research is continuously pushing out the boundary of knowledge in the
"Terra Incognita" and requires the support of the latest technology
triggering new developments and improvements of commercial products. This
workshop will give plenty of examples of the kind and our sponsors are
sensitive to this issue.

Although Knowledge science does not promise to bring new commercial
applications in any near future, it has, nevertheless, brought, these last
years, the "world-wide web", the so-called "internet revolution", it has
launched the industry of the Synchrotron Light, it has created new
diagnostic and therapeutic tools for the hospitals, but that's not all,
many prospects and expectations are ahead of us like the new light source
from the free electron lasers, the ADS: accelerator driven system for the
recycling of nuclear wastes, fusion triggered by charged particle beams,
and so and so forth

Finally, this workshop is international, because Basic science is global in
essence, it is universal, it is for mankind, and all nations are invited to
join their efforts to bring answers to the fundamental questions.
International projects like LHC or even more the future Global Linear
Collider, that are central in these workshop discussions, play an important
role toward the international relations. These so-called "Big Science"
project provide a rare occasion for setting up friendly relationships
between the nations free of copyrights or confidential information
constrains, they create a network of scientists which can be instrumental
in shaping up the future of the mankind.

So I hope that this workshop will contribute to foster new collaborations
between researchers and organizations and in particular with Russian
researchers, I hope it will contribute to propose through the discussions
new ideas or solutions to problems not solved by isolated teams,
but, in addition, I hope that it will provide a clear incentive to the
science policy makers to invest more in basic science. I hope, it will
convey a pledge to fund the global science projects such as the linear
collider, in order to build this world community of knowledge research
which has so drastically changed our life.

"It cannot be wrong to invest in Basic
Science"