This topical group is focused on issues and projects related to (1) Diversity, (2) Inclusion, and (3) Equity. All three are essential not only to professional success in our field, but to developing a better society at large. We aim to gather information concerning diversity/inclusion/equity in our field, instances of success and failures, actions that have been taken by individuals and organizations to promote our core tenets. Ultimately, we aim to produce recommendations and resources that are tailored to particle physics, cosmology, and astrophysics that promote diversity and encourage inclusion and equity at all levels of scientific discourse, engagements and managements.

The group is being led by Mu-Chun Chen, Carla Bonifazi, Johan S. Bonilla and Yi-Hsuan Cindy Lin. We welcome anyone and everyone to contribute following the guidelines here - Link to Slides - and we encourage all topical group discussions to use these slides to frame their own groups meetings to ensure that the entire community feels invited to contribute.

Preliminary report (still under construction) can be viewed here: Link to Overleaf

The submitted LOIs are organized into the following 5 topics:

Leads/Contacts: Cindy Lin, Johan Bonilla

Leads: Erin Hansen, Erica Smith

Lead/Contact: Carla Bonifazi

Lead/Contact: Mu-Chun Chen

Lead: Kétévi A. Assamagan

If you have a thought or idea, there are a number of ways to contribute your perspective and expertise

1. FNAL List-Serv : [email protected] - Announcements are made to this list and you can join this list by following the procedure described on the main page - https://snowmass21.org/start
2. Slack Channel : commf03_div_incl - After joining the slack workspace (https://snowmass2021.slack.com/) search for the channel with this title. There is active engagement in this forum and it can be very enlightening. Please be aware that this engagement should follow the guidelines outlined here - Snowmass Wiki & Direct Link - and we request that you review those guidelines prior to engaging in discussion out of respect to your colleagues.
3. Idea Collection : In addition to engaging in discussion, we encourage you to submit an idea/thought/resource to our “collection” form either anonymously or with your name attached - Link to Google Form for Submission of Idea

All CommF Letters of Intent can be found here : https://www.snowmass21.org/docs/files/?dir=summaries/CommF/

If you have an idea, run with it and please feel encouraged to submit an LoI as an individual in the community.

The approach of the group at the moment bit two-fold. [1] Anyone and everyone is encouraged to submit an LOI if they think they have something they would like to see get attention during snowmass and which they plan to direct some of their energy towards - in this respect it is similar to the other frontiers. [2] On the other hand, we were planning to also submit a generic LOI that tries to flesh out what the “diversity/inclusion” group “should” do, and what topics it “should” cover. The conveners of this topical group have an idea of what we think this is, but want to welcome individuals to contribute ideas with low commitment and be included in this LOI. Hopefully, the union of these two formats will ensure we cover the topics that are most pressing at this time.

We want to ensure that discussions and activities in our scientific community are accessible as broadly as possible. Summarized here are a few examples of issues encountered or addressed during snowmass. We would encourage you to fill out this survey - Link to Survey - to help us gain an understanding of issues facing the community to which we may not be aware.

If you are organizing any event, in snowmass or otherwise, please read through these succinct guidelines on how to make it accessible and inclusive.

A few experiences with virtual events have used captioning services and this is meant to document their experiences and collect information within the community. It is not intended to reflect on the organizers of these (or other) workshops or the companies referenced but convey the experiences had.

For the virtual training - https://indico.cern.ch/event/904759/ - 5 hours of videos were recorded and captioned by the https://www.rev.com/ service at the cost of approximately $300. The videos are linked on the agenda and were confirmed to be of high quality from an expert in our community.

For the LHCP Conference, the virtual version of the conference had no real financial sponsor, except from a small CERN and EPJC sponsorship, which was needed for written proceedings and poster prizes; all grants secured had been frozen to be used for LHCP2021 physically in Paris. In the end, a 3rd party service was hired only for selected plenaries and parallel sessions while AI tools were used for the other sessions.

CERN referred the organizers to use the https://www.ai-media.tv service which quoted 110GBP/hour but the quality has been found to be poor in the past. As such, the http://www.transcriptioncity.co.uk service was used at a cost of ~200GBP/hour. The quality of the transcript is questionable and can be viewed here - Link to Transcript (NOTE: The poster-prize and young scientist awards have been edited by one of the organizers). For the other days, CERN IT provided access to the https://otter.ai tool, but the quality of these transcripts is poor due to the jargon/communication ubiquitous in our field [this has been found consistent with experience in the Energy Frontier of snowmass].

Would you like to volunteer to help improve the situation?

CERN IT is now launching a project on an automated speech recognition (ASR) system for HEP with the Universita Politecnica de Valencia who has a very advanced system for automated transcription with a very efficient training system https://www.mllp.upv.es/. They want to train it on HEP talks with captions validated by HEP physicists, so they’re asking us from LHCP to correct the transcripts provided by TranscriptionCity or by Otter.ai and thus provide a high-quality training dataset for this tool. If you are interested in helping, please contact Giovanni Marchiori.

Here is the list of submitted LOIs to this topic. First index before “/” corresponds to the primary frontier used for the submission.