Blueprint Workshop: Towards a National-Scale AI Collaboration in HEP

A recent community whitepaper, “Building an AI-native Research Ecosystem for Experimental Particle Physics: A Community Vision”, outlines how AI could accelerate discovery in the field and identifies four Grand Challenges that must be addressed to enable transformative progress. This blueprint workshop is intended to bring together the U.S. particle and nuclear physics community to discuss how a coordinated, national-scale collaboration might realize that vision.

A central focus of the workshop will be discussions on how such a national-scale collaboration could be effectively bootstrapped and organized, as well as identifying priorities over the near and medium term.

Such a collaboration, including both universities and DOE laboratories, has a number of potential benefits and opportunities, including:

• a forum for developing a shared roadmap toward an AI-native research ecosystem

• a platform for enabling larger-scale efforts while integrating expertise and resources from across the community

• clear pathways to scale and transition promising R&D activities towards deployment within experiments

• a structure to develop and provide the services needed for the experiments to fully leverage evolving national infrastructure (e.g., AmSC, NAIRR) and large-scale data resources

• a means for fostering both collaboration and healthy competition through the development of shared benchmarks and the development and curation of the supporting datasets

• accessible entry points for individual university groups to engage and contribute

• a coherent framework for cross-experiment activities, enabling solutions with impact to deliver benefit to multiple experiments

• a clear structure for US engagement with international efforts, including those at CERN, and other national and regional collaborations

• a community structure for engagement with industry

• a structure for large scale workforce development activities leveraging both lab and university expertise

This first workshop will consider the potential impact of these opportunities, identifying near-term priorities and exploring means to enable additional initiatives as resources become available. We expect that this discussion will continue in subsequent community workhops during 2026.

This workshop is being organized by the Coordinating Panel for Software and Computing (CPSC) which is hosted by the Division of Particles and Fields (DPF) of the American Physical Society (APS).