Dear EUIMWP participants,

Hi, we are pleased to announce you that Prof. Boštjan Batagelj and his team have offered to host the 1st EUIMWP PhD and ECI meeting in Ljubljana (Slovenia). The meeting will be held from January 31st to February 1st, 2019, at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Tržaška 25, Ljubljana, Slovenia

This meeting aims to provide an opportunity for networking between ECIs and PhD students. We believe that at this early stage of their career the interaction can be very useful in terms of scientific knowledge, exchange of ideas and potential collaborations. To be more concrete:

a) By allowing the ECIs to give short open-type presentations (i.e in form of discussion papers) they can be aware of “who is doing what” in integrated Microwave Photonics, what are the problems and challenges their peers are facing and more importantly if they can provide help, comment or feedback on how to tackle them in light of their experience. This could lead to personal collaborations that can be later formalized by means of STSMs.

b) Moreover, ECIs might find that they are trying to solve similar problems with different approaches so a benefit can be obtained by teaming up. Equally important, new challenges can be identified were two or more ECIs can team to work together in order to find solutions.

c) The meeting can be very useful in terms of exchanging experience on technical approaches, interactions with foundries, software use, design approaches… Interactions can also cover issues related to measurements and characterization. Again, in this case the interaction can provide a more detailed information of common problems that ECIs face when carrying out this work. For example an ECI wishing to perform a chip design/fabrication/testing can get first hand feedback and advice from others who have already completed training and/or a fabrication/test run.

The tentative agenda is as follows:

Thursday 31st January
12:45 – 13:00 Welcome to PhD and ECI participants by Local Organiser
13:00 – 15:30 PhD and ECI presentations (session I)
15:30 – 16:00 Coffee break
16:00 -18:30 PhD and ECI presentations (session II)

Friday 1st February
09:00 – 12:00 Round table: challenges and search for solutions

The Action will cover the travel, accommodation and meals expenses of the participants, according to COST rules (please have a look to the COST Vademecum, downloadable here: https://www.cost.eu/cost-actions/cost-actions-networking-tools/, pages 23-27). Please note that participants from International Partner Countries, IPC (in the case of our Action: USA, Australia, China, Canada, Brazil, Japan, Iran and Colombia) are welcome to participate in this meeting, but unfortunately the Action could not reimburse their expenses, since they are not eligible… We are very sorry about this.

For applying, please send an email to Christos Vagionas (chvagion@csd.auth.gr) and Pepa Bayarri (ghmanager.upv@gmail.com) showing your interest in participating in this meeting. Please state clearly the following information:

1) First name and last name
2) Institution and country
3) Date of PhD defense (foreseen in the case of PhD students, month and year)
4) Gender
5) Tentative title of the presentation (please send also your presentation to Prof. Batagelj (bostjan.batagelj@fe.uni-lj.si) as soon as possible, and always before January 18th, 2019.

We may need to ask you for further documents later.

We will consider applications received before January 18th, 2019.

In the case the number of applications exceeded the number of seats, priority would be given to PhD students on their second half of their training period. The Grant Holder reserves their right to make variations in the number of seats according to budget availability.

Please feel free to disseminate this announcement among the PhD students and ECIs in your groups.

Thank you and kind regards,

Pepa Bayarri (Grant Holder Manager)
José Capmany (Chair and Grant Holder)
Bostjan Batagelj (Local Organiser)
Christos Vagionas (ECI Manager)