On 7 January 2026, the CultCryo ERC project team will kick off the new year with a three-day workshop. From 7 to 9 January, the Paderborn group, led by Prof Dr Suzana Alpsancar, is inviting the entire ERC team to East Westphalia for the annual project workshop. The workshop serves to create synergies through the four major case studies of the ERC team (Food, Air Conditioning, Biomedicine, Computing).
This workshop focuses on data centres, their growing importance in a networked world and the associated cooling requirements. Accordingly, excursions to the Paderborn University's "Noctua 2" and "Otus" supercomputers and to the "green data centre" of VegaSystems GmbH & Co. KG are on the agenda, with two keynote speeches open to the public on 8 January as part of the workshop: Dr Martin Schmitt (Paderborn University) will speak at 11:15 on "The Early History of Data Centers: Historical Development and Environmental Impacts". Dr Patrick Brodie (University College Dublin) will give the second talk of the day on "The Geopolitical Ecology of AI", starting at 18:00. The keynotes are open to the public. Both lectures will take place in room L3.204 of the L-building of Paderborn University.
This workshop will be the third major face-to-face meeting, following the kick-off workshop in Essen and the summer workshop in Darmstadt, and is expected to attract over 25 participants from Darmstadt, Essen, Hamburg, Halle and Canberra/Australia.
More information can be found here.
