INDoS · Working Group 3
Training School
Illustration generated with Google Gemini (AI)
The Working Group 3 (Automated Preprocessing Pipelines) Training School is the INDoS’s first in-person training.
- When: 30 September – 2 October 2026, a three-day meeting, 09:00–18:00 each day.
- Where: Room COLABORA, Espacio Converge, Campus Serrano del CSIC, c/ Serrano 113 posterior, Madrid, Spain (see venue)
- Cost: Nothing to attend, and travel and subsistence are covered for eligible participants (see reimbursement).
- Places: 20 assigned from the pre-registration round · 8 funded seats open through registration, until 21 August (see country representation).
Registration open — 8 funded seats
Closes 21 August 2026, 23:59 CEST
20 places are assigned from the July pre-registration round, and the approved budget carries 8 more funded seats. Countries with no representative yet, or only one, are prioritised — if nobody from your country is attending, your chances are genuinely good, whenever you register. See which countries those are and how places are allocated.
Pre-registration round closed
Pre-registration closed 25 July · availability confirmations closed 6 August
Thanks to everyone who responded: your answers chose these dates, and the first 20 places were assigned from that round on 8 August. If you pre-registered and confirmed your availability, you are in the pool — do not register again. If you answered No or missed the confirmation and can now attend, please do register above.
Venue
Room COLABORA, Espacio Converge, Campus Serrano del CSIC — C/ Serrano 113 posterior (entrance through the main CSIC Campus gate), 28006 Madrid, Spain.
Programme
The meeting is a working meeting, not a lecture series: three task-force blocks in which participants build the Group’s outputs together, plus a hands-on session.
Day 1 — Wednesday 30th September
| Time | Session |
|---|---|
| 09:00 – 09:15 | Welcome and objectives |
| 09:15 – 11:00 | Task Force 3 (Training): training activities, synthesis and next steps |
| 11:00 – 11:15 | Coffee |
| 11:15 – 13:00 | Task Force 3 (Training): training materials roadmap and next steps |
| 13:00 – 14:00 | Lunch |
| 14:00 – 15:45 | Task Force 2 (Literature review): scope, review pre-registration, modality subgroups |
| 15:45 – 16:00 | Coffee |
| 16:00 – 18:00 | Task Force 2 (Literature review): review protocol and reviewer assignment |
Day 2 — Thursday 1st October
| Time | Session |
|---|---|
| 09:00 – 10:30 | Task Force 1 (Tools and workflows inventory): scope and taxonomy |
| 10:30 – 10:45 | Coffee |
| 10:45 – 13:00 | Task Force 1 (Tools and workflows inventory): survey design and inventory outline |
| 13:00 – 14:00 | Lunch |
| 14:00 – 18:00 | Task Force 1 continued: the D3.1 outline, and preparation for the hands-on day |
Day 3 — Friday 2nd October
| Time | Session |
|---|---|
| 09:00 – 13:00 | Open co-working and hacking session on the tools-and-workflows inventory |
| 13:00 – 14:00 | Lunch |
| 14:00 – 17:00 | Hacking continued, and prototype show-and-tell |
| 17:00 – 18:00 | Concluding wrap-up: synthesis, milestones, and next steps |
Selection Process
Timeline
| when | what |
|---|---|
| 6 August 2026 | Potential attendees’ availability confirmation closed ✓ |
| 8 August | Selection ran; the first 20 places assigned ✓ |
| 8 – 21 August | Open registration for the remaining 8 funded seats (register) |
| by 14 August | e-COST invitations of the selected pre-registered attendees are issued |
| 21 August, 23:59 CEST | Registration closes |
| 22 August | The waiting list is rebuilt under the published rule; the open seats are offered from it |
| by 28 August | Everyone who registered is notified, selected or not; second-wave e-COST invitations issued |
| 30 September – 2 October | The Training School |
| 3 October – 14 October | Reimbursement requests must be filed |
Who can take part
To have your costs reimbursed you need to be a registered INDoS member with an affiliation in a COST Member, Cooperating Member, or Near-Neighbour country, or a European RTD Organisation: see Reimbursement.
Not yet a member? Joining INDoS is free and takes a few minutes. If your affiliation falls outside those countries, you are welcome to join us self-funded, seats permitting.
A place is not a reimbursement guarantee. Being selected records your intent to attend and is separate from e-COST. Reimbursement requires INDoS membership and an e-COST invitation that you accept. The local organiser issues these once the participant list is settled.
Country representation
Places are spread across countries before anything else (see how places are allocated). When the list is rebuilt after 21 August, the 20 places already assigned count as taken, so what matters for a new registrant is how represented their country already is:
- No representative yet — highest priority. The first registrant from any of these countries is served before any country’s second, no matter when they register: Algeria, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czechia, Denmark, Egypt, the Faroe Islands, Finland, Georgia, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Jordan, Latvia, Lebanon, Libya, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Moldova, Montenegro, Morocco, Netherlands, North Macedonia, Norway, Palestine, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Syria, Tunisia, Ukraine, United Kingdom.
- One representative — prioritised. Albania, Austria, Estonia, France, Kosovo, Malta, Portugal, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, Switzerland.
- Two representatives. Bosnia and Herzegovina, Germany, Poland, Türkiye. Registrants from these countries join the queue behind the groups above.
Trainees must be affiliated in one of the countries above or in a European RTD Organisation (COST Annotated Rules, Article 6.4). Affiliations in Russia and Belarus are not eligible: COST has suspended cooperation with both until further notice. Affiliations outside all of the above are welcome self-funded, seats permitting, but cannot hold a funded trainee place.
How places are allocated
The Training School has more people who want a place than it has places. The process comprises six rules that implement the following principles:
- Gender balance. The cohort is balanced between women and men, and those who do not declare a gender, or whom neither label represents, are seated without being assigned one.
- Spread across countries comes first. A country with nobody in the cohort is served before a country that already has three people. So a first candidate from an unrepresented country has a genuinely good chance.
- It is not first-come-first-served. Time of registration decides the order within a country, not between countries. Registering early does not put you ahead of somebody from a country we have yet to reach, and we would rather say so than let anyone assume otherwise.
- Full attendance comes first. The training is cumulative — the first days set up the hands-on final day — so somebody who can attend all three days is offered a place first. If you can only make some of the days, still register and say so: you are placed high on the waiting list rather than turned away.
- Self-funded places exist. A small number of places beyond the funded seats can be held by participants who waive reimbursement. They are allocated by the same ordering as the funded seats — waiving reimbursement does not buy priority, it only means the budget is not what limits you. The registration form asks.
Rule 1 — who enters the list
A pre-registration enters the list unless it is set aside for one of these reasons:
| set aside | reason |
|---|---|
| never completed | the respondent did not reach the end of the form |
| consent not given | the final commitment question was not answered I agree |
| withdrawn | in the form, or by email |
| not available | answered no in the confirmation round, or did not answer by 6 August. The dates were known this time |
| affiliation outside the COST area | COST Annotated Rules, Article 6.4: trainees must be affiliated in a COST Full or Cooperating Member, a Near-Neighbour Country, or a European RTD Organisation. Others may be reimbursed as trainers only, never as trainees |
Where one person pre-registered more than once, the entries are merged: their answers are taken from the most recent, their place in the queue from the earliest (correcting a pre-registration doesn’t cost the initial position).
Rule 2 — starting order
Everyone left is ordered by the time of their pre-registration.
Partial attendance. Registering for part of the school never moves anyone behind another country, but full attendance comes first: people who cannot attend all three days are placed at the head of the waiting list rather than seated directly, because the training is cumulative and a funded place is for the whole school.
Rule 3 — local filing time
The survey recorded one server clock, which favours applicants east of it: the same local hour of day produces an earlier recorded time. Every timestamp is restated in the applicant’s own local time before ordering, so that filing first thing in the morning counts equally in Lisbon and in Istanbul.
Rule 4 — gender interleaving
Read from the top. Position 1 should hold a woman, position 2 a man, position 3 a woman, and so on.
- If the person there already has the required gender, they stay.
- Otherwise the nearest person below with the required gender moves up into that position, and everyone in between shifts down by one.
- When such a move is needed, prefer a person from the same country as the applicant currently in that position; look to other countries only if that country cannot supply the required gender. Swapping within one country leaves the order of countries untouched.
- An applicant who recorded neither woman nor man, met before the required gender, takes the position without advancing the alternation. They are never assigned a gender.
- If nobody of the required gender remains below, stop; the rest keeps its order.
Rule 5 — country slotting
Read from the top, counting how many times each country has appeared.
- The first applicant from each country keeps their position.
- Every later applicant from that country moves to the end of the section being processed, in the order encountered, so a country’s second stays ahead of its third, the third ahead of the fourth.
Every country’s first applicant therefore appears before any country’s second.
Rule 6 — iterative reslotting
Rule 5 applied once leaves the applicants it moved back sitting together, so a large national group forms one uninterrupted run. Rule 5 is applied repeatedly, each pass starting at the first position of the group the previous pass moved back.
Pass 1 gathers every country’s first applicant, pass 2 every country’s second, pass 3 every country’s third, and so on, so each national group is separated by the equally-ranked applicants of other countries. It stops when a pass moves nobody.
The algorithm: how these rules are applied
| step | rule |
|---|---|
| 1 | Rule 2 — starting order, by time of pre-registration |
| 2 | Rule 3 — local filing time |
| 3 | Rule 4 — gender interleaving |
| 4 | Rule 5 — country slotting |
| 5 | Rule 6 — iterative reslotting |
| 6 | Rule 4 — gender interleaving |
| 7 | Rules 5 and 6 — country reslotting |
| 8 | Rule 4 — gender interleaving, without the same-country preference of step 3 |
Waiting list
We invite from the top of the list, for as long as the funding lasts. Everyone below that point is on the waiting list, in list order.
A place vacated by a decline or a withdrawal goes to the first person on the waiting list who can hold it:
| who declines | who takes the place |
|---|---|
| a woman | the first woman, or the first person who recorded neither, whoever stands higher on the list |
| a man | the first man, or the first person who recorded neither, whoever stands higher on the list |
| someone who recorded neither | the next person on the list, whoever they are |
Someone who recorded neither can therefore take any place, and their own place is not held for another such person: their seat carries no gender, so nothing about the balance depends on who fills it. Tying them to each other would strand them on the waiting list whenever none was seated. The balance between women and men is otherwise preserved, and people are skipped only across the categories, never within the list they are on. If nobody on the waiting list can hold the place, that is reported rather than filled from another category.
Reimbursement
Travel and subsistence are covered for eligible participants, through the standard COST mechanism. Reimbursement comprises a flat-rate daily allowance (per the COST daily-allowance table for the host country, covering accommodation, meals, and local transport) plus travel costs up to a total of €1,500. There is no registration fee.
The allowance is paid for each day of the event you attend, plus the day you travel in; the day you travel home is paid at 40%.
To be reimbursed you must be a registered INDoS member with an eligible affiliation; accept the e-COST invitation the local organiser issues; sign the attendance list at the event; and submit the Online Travel Reimbursement Request (OTRR) in e-COST within 12 days of the event. COST allows 30 days; ours is shorter so that claims clear before the grant period closes, and a later one risks being rejected. See the COST Annotated Rules and the e-COST platform for details.