WebValley 2024 – International

An opportunity for girls and boys passionate about the world of research attending the fourth year of high school to be grabbed: the call for applications for the “WebValley 2024 – International” summer school camp organized by Trento-based Fondazione Bruno Kessler has been published.

The school will last 3 weeks, from 06/16/2024 to 07/06/2024, and will be hosted at Istituto Artigianelli in Trento, with overnight accommodation for participants provided at Istituto Arcivescovile in Trento.

This year’s edition will be dedicated to observing the Earth from space. The focus of the observations will be the ionosphere and the phenomena that occur in it, such as geomagnetic storms, solar wind variations, changes in fields and plasmas as a result of seismic phenomena or man-made events. The latest data science approaches and sophisticated artificial intelligence techniques will be used as tools and methods of study.  The initiative will focus on the analysis of data collected from instruments aboard the CSES-01 (China Seismo Electromagnetic Satellite) satellite, in orbit since 2018. Special attention will be given to the HEPD-01 high-energy particle detector, built by the Italian Limadou collaboration; also, several applications will be examined, including the analysis of time correlation with seismic and meteorological events. The activity will see the involvement of Fondazione Bruno Kessler’s “Center for Digital Industry” and “Center for Digital Health & Wellbeing”, the Data Science, Data Science for Industry and Physics and Data Science for Health units, the Department of Physics of the University of Trento and the National Institute of Nuclear Physics. The structuring of the camp provides for roughly one week of courses and workshops and two weeks devotd to project development.

As has been the case in past editions, this year’s will be open to international students, so participants are asked to have a good English comprehension skills.

Fondazione Bruno Kessler is granting up to 12 scholarships (also selecting some reserves), some of which will go to students from the province of Trento.  Some additional applications, up to a maximum of 20 in total, will be opened in May for international students, including the finalists of the ISEF Prize, the largest international scientific competition for non-university students.  The grants cover the costs of specialized laboratory activities and room and board. Arrangements for room and board are the responsibility of FBK. Families may be asked to contribute to organized weekend sports and social activities.

Applications can be sumitted online from Tuesday, February 20 until Friday, March 22, 2024.     Applicatioants should register first on the WebValley website at https://webvalley.fbk.eu/accounts/signup.  

Applications should be completed at https://webvalley.fbk.eu/application using the General track.

Submitted applications will be reviewed by a panel of experts, who will prepare a merit ranking using the information received. In particular, the following will be evaluated: school report cards of the last two years, CV, motivation letter, letter of recommendation, pre-recorded interview-video, according as indicated on the website. Very important criteria in the selection phase are soft skills, personal motivation and curiosity.

The selection of candidates may include a personal online interview at the discretion of the committee, which may take place before the application deadline.

Students who participate in WebValley will have the opportunity to have 150 hours of school-to-work program credits accrued at the discretion of their school.

An overview of the projects developed in previous editions can be found on the Summer School WebValley International Summer school website.