Timetable

To achieve its aims, the total duration of this COST Action be four years. In this time period this Action will hopefully lay the basis for Europe to acquire and maintain a leading role in ECCL and to establish strong and focused collaborations with industrial organisations seeking to commercialize products or applications based on ECCL.

Year 1: 1st quarter: First meeting MC with COST Administration, election of Chair, vice-Chair, secretary and the appointment of web and newsletter editor. In this meeting, the WG coordinators will be appointed. The WGs will all meet before the third quarter of the same year to review the current state of the art and their work, and to define their tasks and the means to achieve them. In the forth quarter of the first year, the first annual ECCL meeting will be held, at which the MC will meet to review the strategy to achieve the main goals of the Action and to review the progress reports of the WGs and to act upon them. The main agenda of this meeting is to review the scientific programme of each WG and ensure adequate overlap and interaction between the individual WGs.

Year 2: The WGs will meet at least once before the third quarter and will host the first training workshops and initiate meetings with industrial partners. The training workshops for the second year will be (i) experimental on STM technology and surface science techniques; (ii) theoretical and simulation methods (possibly in collaboration with CECAM, Lyons), including studies in quantum chemistry and scattering. These workshops will be aimed at postgraduate and postdoctoral researchers, and financial support will be sought from national resources and/or industrial organisations. The WG meetings may also be a joint meetings with more than one WG participating. In the third quarter, the second annual ECCL meeting (ECCL2) will take place to which industrial partners (identified by the WGs in their preceding meetings) will be invited to present their vision of the benefits of the Action. The MC will also hold its annual meeting at ECCL2 to review the progress of the individual WGs and their overlapping work. The STSM programme is expected to be most active in the second and third years.

Year 3: The third year will be organised similarly to the second year, but to further develop industrial links and host a meeting specifically to discuss commercial aspects of ECCL is expected. As in year 2, the WGs will meet at least once before the third quarter and will host training workshops and initiate further meetings with industrial partners. The themes of the training workshops for the third year will be identified by participating postgraduate and postdoctoral researchers during the second year, and suggested to the MC. In the third quarter, the third annual ECCL meeting (ECCL3) will be held with strong representation of industrial partners. The MC will also hold its annual meeting at ECCL3 to review the progress of the individual WGs and review areas of overlapping work.

Year 4: The timetable for the fourth year, which is the closing year of the Action, will be similar to the second and third years with the closing meeting of the MC at the end of the year. It is anticipated that this meting will take place together with the Final Conference that will be organised at the conclusion of the Action. This conference will be the pre-eminent conference on ECCL and will be open to non-network members. Conference proceedings will be published in collaboration with an international journal. A special volume summarising the Action’s research may be published in collaboration with Canopus books, a subsidiary of Springer-Verlag.

 

Last updated: 28th September 2007