The roles of the SCAB Nominations and Activities systems in the ATLAS-CERN speakers selection

¹ Signal Processing Lab, COPPE/EE - UFRJ (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro)
² Laboratório de Instrumentação e Física Experimental de Partículas - LIP, Lisboa

^* e-mail: carolina.niklaus.moreira.da.rocha.rodrigues@cern.ch
^** Copyright 2025 CERN for the benefit of the ATLAS Collaboration. CC-BY-4.0 license

Published online: 7 October 2025

Abstract

Considering CERN’s prosperous environment, developing groundbreaking research in physics, and pushing technology’s barriers, CERN members participate in many talks and conferences every year. However, given that the ATLAS experiment has around 6000 members and more than one could be qualified to present the same talk, the experiment developed metrics to prioritize them. Currently, ATLAS is organized in a tree structure with groups and subgroups, called Activities. Each Activity has responsible members such as the conveners or sub-conveners, project leaders, and activity coordinators. Because of the hierarchy mentioned, the member’s nomination will work its way up the branches, providing the upper levels with input from the lower ones. Previously, this process was not automated and happened through the exchange of spreadsheets, not providing these conveners and coordinators with the big picture of the nominations’ priorities and reasons. To improve this process, two systems were developed by the ATLAS Glance team: Activities and SCAB Nominations. The Activities interface provides a user-friendly view to manage the activities tree structure, the coordinators of each activity, and their allowed actions in the nomination process. The SCAB Nominations interface automates the nomination process of the ATLAS Speakers Committee Advisory Board, allowing all the coordinators to give their nominees priorities, and justify them in comments. These two systems contribute to a more holistic process for selecting collaboration members to present at a specific conference. This contribution delves into their specifications.