New Research Areas

In its new strategic plan, ICTP announced new research areas it will pursue in fields related to existing ones which could have significant interdisciplinary research potential, especially in their possible impact on developing countries. Those fields are:

Energy and Sustainability

Energy is a topic of key importance for developing countries, which have special needs for energy use and production. This new ICTP research area will concentrate on different sources of energy (with a focus on renewable energy) and their impact in the developing world. The area complements current activities of the Earth System Physics and Condensed Matter Physics sections, in particular the latter section's computational modelling of different materials relevant for energy conversion and storage. The hope is that such research could be implemented in collaboration with other local and national institutions.

Computing Sciences

The systematic study of algorithmic processes that create, describe, and transform information and its applications in computing systems is an ever-growing field that somehow now mirrors the role that theoretical physics used to play years ago when ICTP was founded. It has direct impact on society as a whole, and can be implemented in developing countries through improved access to computers via the internet. It is directly related to development and has important financial implications. This activity could be considered as a natural extension of the mathematics group to more applied areas. Expanding the scope of this new group to include quantum computing could also link with current research interests at ICTP and the University of Trieste.

A local cluster of computers would provide a world-class facility for the Centre's scientists and visitors. This will be needed for independent computational resources at ICTP for the existing groups (mostly Condensed Matter and Earth System Physics) and for the proposed new sections mentioned above.

Activities view all

Europe/Rome 2021-09-06 08:00:00 2021-11-05 21:00:00 The CODATA RDA Research Data Science Summer School | (smr 3615) An ICTP Virtual Meeting This school provides Early Career Researchers (at MSc-level to 3 years after their PhD) and Professionals with the necessary set of foundational Data Science skills to enable them to analyse their data in an efficient and effective manner for the 21st century. The material covered here is fundamental to all areas of Data Science and hence open to researchers from all disciplines that deal with significant amounts of data. The focus is to provide a practical introduction to these topics with extensive labs and seminars. Topics: Open Science and Responsible Conduct of Research Introduction to Unix Shell Programming for Analysis Git Research Data Management Author Carpentry Data Visualisation Information Security Machine Learning Computational Infrastructures The school will be run on an online basis. Participants will be allowed seven days (a week) to complete each topic. Generally the participant would need to make provision for at least seven to eight hours to work through the content of the theme. The content also makes provision for practical exercises and at least one live question and answer session where facilitators will address concerns participants may have. Content will be provided as video lectures as well as presentation slides. Registration: there is no registration fee. Online - ICTP pio@ictp.it 6 Sep 2021 - 5 Nov 2021

» The CODATA RDA Research Data Science Summer School | (smr 3615)

Europe/Rome 2021-09-20 08:00:00 2021-09-24 22:00:00 SciTinyML: Scientific Use of Machine Learning on Low-Power Devices | (smr 3612) An ICTP Virtual Meeting Registration: there is no registration fee. Online - ICTP pio@ictp.it 20 Sep 2021 - 24 Sep 2021

» SciTinyML: Scientific Use of Machine Learning on Low-Power Devices | (smr 3612)

Europe/Rome 2021-11-17 07:00:00 2021-11-19 21:00:00 Career Development Workshop for Women in Physics | (smr 3614) An ICTP Virtual Meeting Registration: There is no registration fee. Online - ICTP pio@ictp.it 17 Nov 2021 - 19 Nov 2021