A unique experience: a Nobel Prize dense meeting

by Anna Stakia

I was recently honored to be accepted to participate in the 66th Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting which took place in the week of 26/6 – 1/7/2016 in Lindau, Germany. Introducing a bit this year’s meeting: 400 young scientists from 80 countries were provided the opportunity for an in-depth exchange with 29 Nobel Prize and one Turing Award Laureates. This year’s Meeting was mostly dedicated to Physics (most Nobel Laureates had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics, fewer in Chemistry).

Well, I frankly don’t know where to begin when it comes to describing this spectacular event. Still there is a mixture of three words which could maybe represent it

Lost in unfolded space – part III: “Let a hundred flowers bloom, let a hundred schools of thought contend” (Mao Tse-Tung)

by Andrea Giammanco

In the first episode of this series of posts I tried to convey the simplicity of the unfolding problem; in the second I warned against the dire consequences of treating it a bit too simply.

This third post is about a few of the methods that are most popular in experimental HEP (although usually originated outside of HEP) to address the problem.

First of all, a reminder of the problem that we are trying to solve

Oxford secondment

by Giles Strong

So here I am, back in England; currently working on secondment at Oxford University with Alessia and Cecilia, two fellow AMVA4NewPhysics researchers.

Surprisingly, I had only visited Oxford once before, during undergraduate applications, but it’s certainly nice to be back. Not only does it have a lot of history and amazing buildings, but it was also one of the settings for

After two weeks in Oxford…

by Alessia Saggio

Hello everybody,

If you were wondering where I ended up (but also if you weren’t), I’m happy to let you know that I’m in Oxford since two weeks! I joined Cecilia who’s based here and also Giles joined us some days ago.

In these two weeks I’ve been working on the implementation of MoMEMta for the pp→HH→4b jets process since we want

Stereotypes about the British

by Cecilia Tosciri

Many people, especially Italian people, like to complain about the weather in the United Kingdom and endorse other stereotypes, as the bad food, the expensive living, the excessive politeness of British people, the lack of the use of bidet… Well, that’s all true!

During the last three weeks in Oxford

MLHEP challenges

by Pablo de Castro

Hej! I am ashamed to say that this is the only Swedish I was able to learn at the 2nd Machine Learning in High Energy Physics Summer School you already heard about from Giles. ML-wise the school was quite instructive, though, especially due to competitions organized during the school. I also have a challenge for you!

Extreme Statistics

by Greg Kotkowski

If I introduce myself as a statistician, people often react: “You should teach me how to win the soccer bets and lotteries”. Then I try to explain that every hazard game is designed so that the mean revenue is positive for a casino or a lottery owner. But many people still try to find a way to break the system and “fool” an underlying statistical model. Is it ever possible?

Lately I attended an interesting lecture about the Extreme Value Theory. It is the study of 

Lost in unfolded space – part II: “and then I accidentally divided by zero…”

by Andrea Giammanco

In my previous post I drove you from the safe land of The Truth to the so called “smeared space” (i.e., what is actually observable), where things are murky and brown, and then back to the “unfolded space”, which resembles your point of departure, but with some noise due to the amount of information that was lost in the process.

I started with a two-bin measurement that only demands to invert a 2×2 matrix. The most advanced mathematics

MLHEP School in Lund

by Giles Strong

Hej! It’s been about a week now since I returned from Sweden, where I’d attended an excellent school on machine learning at Lund University. The course consisted of a series of lectures and seminars which started from the very basics of machine learning, and finished with us training convolutional neural-networks on GPU clusters kindly lent to us by the Finnish National Supercomputing Centre!

Lund is a small university-town in south-west Sweden, and is