Conference overview

The 16^th IEEE NPSS Real Time Conference (RTC) was held at the Institute of High Energy Physics (IHEP) of Beijing, China, from May 10th to May 15th 2009. This is the first conference sponsored by NPSS ever to be held in this country. The conference was chaired by Professor Yifang Wang, associate director of the Institute. Professor Yantai Shu, from the nearby Tianjin University was the co-chair of the conference, while professor Zhen´An Liu, from IHEP, was the local chair. There were 188 registered participants, which is close to the maximum number manageable for a 5-days conference without parallel sessions, which is the tradition for the Real Time Conferences. More than one third of the participants were coming from China. As expected, there was a large representation from the 4 major CERN experiments, reflecting the exceptional activity associated with the startup of the LHC.