The second USC-C General Assembly is here!
The medium-long term objective of this USC is of contributing and facilitating the sharing of competences and skills present in the INAF in the various ICT areas, starting from data, towards hardware, software and networks architectures and infrastructures, in order to grow a IT ecosystem around the research and development in astronomy and astrophysics. The final aim of all of that being the support, for the next few decades, of the very high competitiveness of the members of INAF in the international arena.
The Assembly will offer again a great opportunity to meet all INAF people involved in the different thematics connected to the data and computing technologies, affecting the whole data life cycle. In fact, the meeting targets all INAF people working in technology for the research, development and innovation in astronomy and astrophysics, including data management and archives, computation, facilities controls and operation, data centers and software tools, networks and hardware, AI techniques/technologies, quantum computing and the transversal fields.
Moreover, the meeting will also be the occasion to meet people of the INAF structures involved in the design, deployment, management and support of the digital infrastructures, tools and services for the whole personnel.
Furthermore, the Assembly will host a series of parallel sessions dedicated to administrative staff, focused on organizational topics, budgeting, and in general on the digitalisation of public administrations and on the challenges related to the development of new management systems, and the use of those already acquired.
The assembly will give opportunities to enforce the expertise and competences (also through the offerings of specific training sessions), to disseminate experiences, activities and best practises around common needs and problems, and to promote discussions in the several thematics stream among all the personnel involved in INAF. This could help the establishment or consolidation of collaborations and facilitate the information exchange.
Finally, in this occasion we had choosen a scenografic location very close to the Trieste Astronomical Observatory, so we could benefit of the closeness of this INAF Structure as space and technical support for the success of the training, splinter sessions and parallel events. The particular location could promote the "team-up" action among all the people working or interested in specific fields, and also allows for professional development; in this regard, participation in the entire week is strongly encouraged.
We invite the participants to the submission of abstracts in any of the themes. The deadline for abstract submission is 15 February 2026. Acceptance of the abstract will be communicated by 27 February 2026.
Thanks to the support of USC-C, there is no registration fee for INAF personnel.
Obviously, the participants will have to take care of all the other costs. In particular, please note that booking of the accomodation at the venue of the Assembly must be done individually (and independently from the registration) following the instructions reported at the menu "Logistic" on the left side of this page. The deadline for the booking of the accomodation at the venue of the Assembly (and at the agreed price, see Logistics menu for details) is 29 January 2026, whereas the registration will remain open until 06 March 2026.
