MVAs @ LIP: it begins!

by Giles Strong

G’day! The past two months have seen the first bit of MVA application in my research. I’ve also had the pleasure of helping to supervise three students from IST, the local university, who’ve been working on summer internships at LIP. The students (António, João, and Ricardo) have expressed interest in detailing their work as guest-posts on here

Fuel for research

by Giles Strong

As our regular readers may have noticed from the recent posts on here, the participants of our research network get around a bit, attending various schools, conferences, and secondments about the globe. This involves staying in a variety of accommodations, and quite often self-catering.

I love cooking and one of my favourite meals to make is dahl; it’s cheap, tasty, filling, and quick to make. I would

Model selection uncertainty

by Greg Kotkowski

For the last three weeks I’ve been experiencing the real adventure of being a researcher. Before, I was rather confident with my data analysis skills. I constantly developed my knowledge in this area, but it was rather an extension of the methods than unexpected discoveries.

But then, three weeks ago, my state of the art was demolished right from its foundations.

During the last semester

Reaching Out

by Tommaso Dorigo

Today I gave a look at the geographical provenance of the visitors to this blog, to see what progress we have made in the course of its eight months of activity.

Of course starting a new blog is never easy – attracting regular readers is difficult, and the offer of good outreach material nowadays is very broad; so you need to post regularly, and add good content. All in all I am satisfied of our action, but there’s room for improvement; I should mention that the AMVA4NewPhysics network is

Lost in unfolded space – last episode: “Thou shalt not unfold”

by Andrea Giammanco

This is the end of my unfolding series, whose previous episodes can be found here, here, and here.

This post discusses when we should apply unfolding to our data, and when not.

There is an interesting thing about the unfolding community: when you ask an expert for practical advice, the expert typically starts by asking why you think you need unfolding, and will in general discourage you from doing it.

Some time ago, a mini-workshop on unfolding techniques was organized by a group inside CMS. I was quite interested

Higgs to bbbar at ICHEP 2016

by Tommaso Dorigo

The ICHEP conference in Chicago is drawing to a close, and although I did not have the pleasure to attend it (I was busy with real work, you know 😉 I think I can post here some commentary of a few things I find interesting among the multitude of analyses and searches that were shown there. It goes without saying that the selection is biased by my personal interest, plus by my limited patience

Bonjour le monde !

by Fabricio Jiménez

Hello there! My name is Fabricio Jiménez and this is my first post in this blog. I have just started my doctoral studies at Université Blaise Pascal in Clermont-Ferrand (France) and am thrilled to take part in the AMVA4NewPhysics Innovative Training Network as an Early Stage Researcher for the next three years. The subject of my thesis will be within a general search for new physics, using statistical learning tools to analyze data taken by the ATLAS experiment at the LHC.

The importance of being together

by Alessia Saggio

One month has passed since I arrived in Oxford, and now it’s already time to leave. What’s quite strange is that I surprised myself thinking that I’m sad to go away from here, even though tomorrow I’m going back to Italy for my vacations. Don’t get me wrong, of course I’m looking forward to catching up with my family again, but I have to say that this month has been even better than expected.

I’ve been working with Cecilia and Giles. We worked