HSF Steering Group Meeting, 9 October 2026
- Attending
- 1/6. News
- 2/6. Joint WLCG/HSF workshop 2026 in Bologna - AG meeting at the workshop
- 3/6. Activity Areas
- 4/6. “Responsible AI-assisted coding and common training aspects” endeavour, AI guidelines - “AI Statement” for contributors to HSF repositories
- 5/6. Project Affiliation and Affiliated Projects
- 6/6. Miscellaneous HSF matters
- AOB
Attending
Present/Contributing: Eduardo Rodrigues, Claire Antel, Johannes Elmsheuser, Michel Hernandez Villanueva, Liz Sexton-Kennedy, Pere Mato, James Whitehead, Paul, Stefan Roiser
Apologies:
1/6. News
Advisory Group news and follow-ups
Actions (still) from the last meeting:
- Attract representatives from ALICE - none yet found. Stop at this point? Agreed to close this task.
Further news in due time post the AG meeting to be held during the WLCG/HSF workshop in Nov.
Invitation to workshop on Agentic AI next
- 3-day workshop on Agentic AI, Gigantic Aims to be held in Barcelona on April 5-7 2027.
- Invitation from our Spanish colleagues from the COMCHA network (contact: Arantza Oyanguren).
- Event will have roundtables with the physics coordinators of the experiments on interpretability and validity, on accessibility, on ethics (sustainability, security, authorship…) and on training.
- Invitation sent for HSF participation towards a workshop outcome by means of a manifesto or statement of recommendations.
- Invitation to have the HSF co-organise and prepare the agenda, with 2 HSF colleagues part of the organising committee.
- ACTION: agreed to have Claire and Michel H. Also agreed to have the HSF logo displayed on the event Indico page.
2/6. Joint WLCG/HSF workshop 2026 in Bologna
- Indico: https://indico.cern.ch/event/1695268/.
- Review of abstracts and agenda being finalized.
- We have a rather healthy number of abstracts for the several HSF parallel sessions (close to 20).
AG meeting at the workshop
Reminder - we will have another AG meeting during the Bologna workshop to (1) avoid having a long 1-year delay (as in the past) while (2) profiting from the fact that most AG members will be at the workshop anyway.
- Please share any points you may want discussed with the AG.
- One item we should add is a review of membership as we are approaching the first 2 years.
- Lack of engagement.
3/6. Activity Areas
- A full report at the end of this year’s GSoC 2026 programme will be given at the joint WLCG/HSF workshop in Bologna.
-
Series of HSF Seminars and Compute Accelerator Forum meetings: we’ve been seeing a great programme organised. Congrats!
-
Nothing particular to be reported from people in touch with AA conveners.
- See agenda item “Miscellaneous HSF matters” for discussion of engagement of AA conveners.
4/6. “Responsible AI-assisted coding and common training aspects” endeavour, AI guidelines
- Very successfully kicked off in July (https://indico.cern.ch/event/1705480/).
- Followed up with another meeting, and a dedicated session will run during the joint WLCG/HSF workshop.
“AI Statement” for contributors to HSF repositories
So far HSF repositories do not provide any statement on AI-powered/-helped contributions, and we are getting some regularly. On occasions we can be flooded by not-to-useful contributions. This year an “AI statement” is strongly suggested in GSoC proposals. We should do something similar.
- There is an ongoing discussion at https://github.com/HSF/hsf.github.io/issues/1919 and there are 2 open PRs to review asap:
- https://github.com/HSF/hsf.github.io/pull/1953: addition of CONTRIBUTING.md.
- https://github.com/HSF/hsf.github.io/pull/1949: addition of PULL_REQUEST template.
- Both have been up for long time with no input other from 2 people.
- ACTION: please review next week and we will then go ahead and merge (can get follow up PRs if needed).
- (Note: the PRs are not exclusively about “AI contributions” - also include good etiquette, due diligence, etc.).
5/6. Project Affiliation and Affiliated Projects
No new affiliations since we finalised a significant review of the programme.
- Status at https://hepsoftwarefoundation.org/projects/projects.html - 6 projects affiliated.
- Final stamp from the SG to be decided now for the nopayloaddb - affiliated as Tier-2.
The following list of projects to prioritise has been sent in Sep. to the AG for feedback:
- ACTS - Caterina to follow-up
- Clad
- CVMFS
- DD4hep
- EvtGen
- FastJet
- Gaudi - Stefan can do review, ditto for Paul
- Geant4
- HepData
- HepMC3
- HERWIG
- hls4ml - Eduardo to review with Maarten Van Veghel
- Invenio
- LHCb Conditions DB - Stefan / Paul
- Omnifold - Saptaparna to follow-up
- MCFM
- Millepede-II
- Phoenix - Johannes to follow-up - can do review, need to find 2nd reviewer
- PODIO - Michel V. to follow-up
- Rivet - Nicole and Menglin Xu starting the review
- Rucio - Paul following up - no differential review helps
- XRootD
- WHIZARD
WIP ACTION: attach names to make things happen - basically a person to take care of finding 2 reviewers and potentially be a reviewer. - Typical pool of reviewers: AA conveners, SG members, HSF affiliated project leads, expert community colleagues.
6/6. Miscellaneous HSF matters
HSF Budget
Healthy. Used recently to help presence of SG members at the WLCG/HSF workshop.
Engagement within HSF bodies and with the community
Commitment within members:
- Several AAs are very quiet, hardly engaging.
- The SG members need to lend a hand.
- It’s too often the same colleagues over and over again taking up tasks.
Engagement community-HSF:
- We need to better communicate with/to the outside world, meaning the community.
- The AG should play a role here, serving as liaison to Engaged Communities (i.e. experiments, community projects) other bodies.
- The HSF is not brought to the attention of new PhD students and early-career colleagues as nearly much as it could. This is a missed opportunity. More engagement would be beneficial to all.
- How to make the HSF and the Forum mailing list (more) widely known within the community?
- Posters and LHC experiment PhD student welcome sessions mentioned.
SG Composition
- If you know of someone who is active in community work and shares the HSF’s goals consider inviting them to be on the SG.
- We should review annually the composition. Reminder that our SG webpage states that “When a SG member becomes inactive (e.g., ceases to meaningfully follow any HSF activities) in the HSF they will leave the SG.”.
HSF GitHub matters
A trivial little help reviewing meeting minutes and the odd open PR would be helpful.
AOB
Next Meeting
TBD, as we see fit. (For sure after the WLCG/HSF workshop in Nov.)