CERN’s knowledge translates into impact across several domains, including medical technology, the handling of big data, and the environment. Ensuring that CERN’s knowledge and technologies reach society as a whole is enshrined in the Organization’s founding Convention, which states that: “the results of its experimental and theoretical work shall be published or otherwise made generally available”. This has fostered a long-standing tradition of freely and openly sharing scientific knowledge for the benefit of all, which is manifested today in many forms. The Organization engages in collaboration agreements with industry, supports spin- off companies, participates in projects co-funded by the European Commission and is a pioneer in open-access scientific publishing. CERN’s Knowledge Transfer group engages with experts in science, technology and industry in order to create opportunities for the transfer of CERN’s technology and know-how.

During the period covered by this report, the Organization signed six license agreements and one non-disclosure agreement on technologies related to the environment. In 2020, the Knowledge Transfer group hosted an innovation day focused on health, safety and the environment, which is also one of the focus areas for 2021.

Besides these agreements, CERN has other technologies with potential benefit for the environment, such as superconducting electrical transmission lines (see Discovery machines) and CO₂ cooling technology. The latter is being actively investigated for applications beyond the Laboratory, such as for cooling batteries or data centres.

The CERN Control and Monitoring Platform, C2MON, is a modular Java framework for fast-built, highly available, large-scale industrial monitoring and control solutions. It has been developed for CERN’s demanding infrastructure-monitoring needs, and is based on more than 10 years of experience with the Technical Infrastructure Monitoring (TIM) systems at CERN. It is distributed under the open source GNU LGPLv.3 licence, a form of free software licence. The C2MON technology is currently used in several initiatives, such as PlanetWatch (see In focus) and SecuraXis, a new acoustics sensor system designed to detect and report emergencies like fires and explosions.

Claudio Parrinello, CEO and co-founder of PlanetWatch.

— What is PlanetWatch?

CP: PlanetWatch is a CERN spin-off company, which joined Innogex, the French Business Incubation Centre of CERN technologies, in 2020. We decentralise and incentivise environmental monitoring. By using a citizen-science-oriented approach with incentives, we can deploy dense, real-time air quality monitoring networks in cities in a fast and cost-effective way.

— What role has CERN’s technology played in developing PlanetWatch?

CP: We have a licence agreement for C2MON. We leverage this technology in the framework of data acquisition systems. The challenge is to acquire, validate and process data from thousands of sensors. We haven't fully leveraged its potential yet, so we look forward to further interactions with the C2MON community.

Questions regarding this report may be addressed to environment.report@cern.ch.