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Journal of synchrotron radiation 1(1), 242 - 250 (2023). doi:10.1107/S1600577522010347, The PERCIVAL detector is a CMOS imager designed for the soft X-ray regime at photon sources. Although still in its final development phase, it has recently seen its first user experiments: ptychography at a free-electron laser, holographic imaging at a storage ring and preliminary tests on X-ray photon correlation spectroscopy. The detector performed remarkably well in terms of spatial resolution achievable in the sample plane, owing to its small pixel size, large active area and very large dynamic range; but also in terms of its frame rate, which is significantly faster than traditional CCDs. In particular, it is the combination of these features which makes PERCIVAL an attractive option for soft X-ray science., Published by Wiley-Blackwell, [Erscheinungsort nicht ermittelbar]

EPICS IOCs at Diamond Light Source are built, deployed, and managed by a set of in-house tools that were implemented 15 years ago. This paper will detail a proof of concept to demonstrate replacing these tools and processes with modern industry standards. IOCs are packaged in containers with their unique dependencies included. IOC images are generic, and a single image is required for all containers that control a given class of device. Configuration is provided to the container in the form of a start-up script only. The configuration allows the generic IOC image to bootstrap a container for a unique IOC instance. This approach keeps the number of images required to a minimum. Container orchestration for all beamlines in the facility is provided through a central Kubernetes cluster. The cluster has remote nodes that reside within each beamline network to host the IOCs for the local beamline. All source, images and individual IOC configurations are held in repositories. Build and deployment to the production registries is handled by continuous integration. Finally, a development container provides a portable development environment for maintaining and testing IOC code., Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Accelerator and Large Experimental Physics Control Systems, ICALEPCS2021, Shanghai, China

The aim of this master’s thesis is to investigate how COVID-19 has impacted travel and tourism and how the industries can transform themselves in order to become competitive in ”the next normal”. To do so, we have done a deep-dive on two industries –namely the airline and cruise industry –and by gathering, analysing and interpreting secondary and primary data we have sought to outline how the industries were performing prior to the pandemic, to which extent they have been impacted during the pandemic, and what we can expect the next normal to look like. Thus, the main question that we have set out to investigate in this thesis is: “How is COVID-19 currently changing the airline and cruise industries, and how can industry players reimagine themselves in order to become competitive in “the next normal”?” The present chapter attempts methodically to outline what business travellers –the most impacted airline customer segment –can expect in the next normal. This is done, first, by contextualising the segment, i.e. providing a picture of how the segment was performing prior to COVID-19 and which role it played to airlines. Secondly by using secondary and primary data to explain how COVID-19 has impacted the segment’s flight consumption. Finally, by looking at ongoingtrends and by understanding the needs and wants of business travellers, it looks at how the future is currently forming and will continue to shape. Secondary data shows that, while just accounting for 10% of global airline passengers, business travellers drive up to 75% of airline profits and 50% of airline revenues, and thus airlines are inarguably dependent on this segment to run successfully. The entire infrastructure of business-oriented airlines is built up around serving this segment and their leisure passengers thus function as loss leaders. During COVID-19, the business segment has been impacted more than its leisure counterpart as (1) business everywhere has been moved from the office to peoples’ homes, and (2) because companies do not want to risk the health of their employees. Primary data shows that the future will be increasingly remote, however all indicators point to only the most non-essential business travel to be replaced by video conferencing in the future as there is a broad consensus that trainings, negotiations and conferences are significantly more effective and engaging in-person. Given the novelty and unpredictability of COVID-19, researching this topic has been exceptionally difficult as industry data and forecasts as well as consumer sentiment changes on a daily basis. Thus, this research deck should be interpreted as a screenshot of the situation and how we recommend airlines and cruises to deal with it as of January 2021 while the pandemic is still developing rapidly, rather than a fixed conclusion for solving the managerial problems that have emanated.

The increasing data throughput of modern detectors is a growing challenge for back-end data acquisition systems. OdinData provides a scalable framework for data acquisition used by multiple beamlines at Diamond Light Source (DLS). While it can be implemented standalone, OdinControl is used to provide a convenient interface to OdinData. Eiger detectors at DLS were initially integrated into the Odin framework specifically for the data acquisition capability, but the addition of detector control provides a more coherent and easily deployable system. OdinControl provides a generic HTTP API as a single point of control for various devices and applications. Adapters can abstract the low-level control of a detector into a consistent API, making it easier for high-level applications to support different types of detector. This paper sets out the design and development of Odin as a control system agnostic interface to integrate Eiger detectors into EPICS beamline control systems at DLS, as well as the current status of operation., Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Accelerator and Large Experimental Physics Control Systems, ICALEPCS2019, New York, NY, USA

Diamond Light Source is the UK’s synchrotron facility. The support and development of the beamlines and accelerators at Diamond requires a significant quantity of specific knowledge and skills; the opportunity to acquire these beforehand is not available to many early in their career. This limits the field of candidates who can begin working independently at the level of software systems engineer. The graduate software engineer development program was started in 2015 to provide a route for engineers who are recent graduates or new to the field to develop the required skills and experience. Over the course of two years it comprises a series of projects in different groups, mentored on-the-job training and organized training courses. The program has recently been expanded to cover all groups in the Scientific Software, Controls and Computation department at Diamond, with an intake of four new engineers per year. This paper presents the structure and development of the program and invites discussion with other organizations to share knowledge and experience., Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Accelerator and Large Experimental Physics Control Systems, ICALEPCS2019, New York, NY, USA

Detectors currently being commissioned at Diamond Light Source (DLS) bring the need for more sophisticated control and data acquisition software. The Excalibur 1M and 3M are modular detectors comprised of rows of identical stripes. The Odin framework emulates this architecture by operating multiple file writers on different server nodes, managed by a central controller. The low-level control and communication is implemented in a vendor supplied C library with a set of C-Python bindings, providing a fast and robust API to control the detector nodes, alongside a simple interface to interact with the file writer instances over ZeroMQ. The file writer is a C++ module that uses plugins to interpret the raw data and provide the format to write to file, allowing it to be used with other detectors such as Percival and Eiger. At DLS we implement an areaDetector driver to integrate Odin with the beamline EPICS control system. However, because Odin provides a simple HTTP Rest API, it can be used by any site control system. This paper presents the architecture and design of the Odin framework and illustrates its usage as a controller of complex, modular detector systems., Proceedings of the 16th Int. Conf. on Accelerator and Large Experimental Control Systems, ICALEPCS2017, Barcelona, Spain

In this paper we report about a large scale teaching experiment conducted at a large introductory mathematics course which took place in the academic years 2016-2017 and 2017-2018. The experiment was initially forced by external needs: Due to general budget cuts we (the course managers and authors of this paper) received a though assignment: To reduce working hours for external teaching assistants with one third - without compromising the teaching quality. Of course that seemed impossible, but we had to try. We were not offered any time for pilot projects etc., we had to find a solution that could be implemented soon and for all 1100 students at the same time. Thus, the budget reduction gave rise to a course redesign problem: How could we over short time reorganize a large course in order to reduce the number of contact hours between teaching staff and students whilst maintaining the quality of learning and teaching. Since we did not want to cut in the scheduled teaching time, the only way we would have a chance to resolve the redesign problem was through extended use of technology. But whatkind of technology should be chosen and how should it be used? We knew, as stated in a thorough OECD-report, that technology does not necessarily improve learning: “The connections among students, computers and learning are neither simple nor hard-wired; and the real contributions ICT can make to teaching and learning have yet to be fully realized and exploited" [1]. Accordingly, it was clear to us that we should pay close attention to the way in which we would implement a new digital tool, and that it should be carefully based on an analysis of local needs and conditions. We found that this could be done in three steps: 1) First we had to get an overall status of the mathematical competencies that we want the students to obtain during the course and find out where teachers are needed the most, 2)next we had to analyze how the use of digital tools could actually support the current learning goals, and 3) finally, in the implementation, we should not underestimate practical constraints such as numbers of students, available classrooms, ICT- infrastructure and network connections. In the paper we will describe how we took these steps, completed a new informed course setup/redesign and how we have evaluated our efforts.