GSI

by Tommaso Dorigo

GSI, the Helmholtz Centre for Heavy Ion Research, is a laboratory located near the town of Darmstadt, in central Germany, just a few miles away from the Frankfurt airport. The centre was founded in 1969, and has since then been a very active facility where heavy elements are studied (six rare heavy ones were in fact discovered there, including the one they named Darmstadtium!), and where

Recruitment Statistics

by AMVA4NewPhysics Press Office

Today we finalized a revision to a document detailing the progress of the AMVA4NewPhysics network – it is called “Progress Report” and is a deliverable, something that the Research Executive Agency of the EU expects networks to produce by a specific time. In the document the action of the network is carefully described in all its facets. In drafting the revision of the document, we came across some statistics that we think is interesting to share here. It concerns the 10 recruitment

From Stars To Particles

by Ioanna Papavergou

Hi there! As this is my first post at the blog let me introduce myself. My name is Ioanna Papavergou and I am the new ESR of the AMVA4NewPhysics selected for the position at IASA in Athens. I was born and raised in Kavala, a small city by the sea located in the northern part of Greece.

Physics was my passion since high school and so there was no other option to me than studying Physics during my undergrad studies, getting my Bachelor degree from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. During the

Convolutional Neural Networks and neutrinos

by Cecilia Tosciri

Have you ever wondered how Facebook suggests the tags for the picture you post on your wall, or how the photo library on your computer manages to automatically create albums containing pictures of particular people? Well, they use facial recognition software based on Convolutional Neural Network (CNN).

CNN is the most popular and effective method for object recognition, and it is a specialized kind of neural network for processing data that has a known grid-like topology. The network employs a mathematical operation

Art And Science: Students At Work

By Tommaso Dorigo

The project “Art and Science: the colours of the Higgs boson” is in full swing in Venice, where 15 to 17-year-old students from three schools (the Liceo Stefanini, the Liceo Foscarini and the Liceo Benedetti) are producing artwork inspired by the CMS experiment and the Higgs boson. In this blog we already reported of conferences held at the schools by the Ph.D. students of the AMVA4NewPhysics network in January.  Now it is time for the students to build on the inspiration provided by those lectures and by the images of particle collisions, detector pieces, and Feynman diagrams.

Today I visited the students who participate to the project at Liceo Foscarini, and gave some hints and suggestions to the students on how to

A Night With The Giant

by Tommaso Dorigo

This evening (April 14) I am blogging from a residence in Sesto val Pusteria, a beautiful mountain village in the Italian Alps. I came here for a few days of rest after a crazy work schedule in the past few days -the reason why my blogging has been intermittent. Sesto is surrounded by glorious mountains, and hiking around here is marvelous. But right now, as I sip a non-alcoholic beer (pretty good), chilling off after a day out, my thoughts are focused 500,000,000 kilometers away.

As an amateur astronomer since the age of seven, I have always loved to watch the night sky and its treasures. Nowadays I do that very infrequently, however, as work is a tyrant. But really the real reason why my observing sessions are rare is that

Understanding Neural-Networks: Part IV – Improvements & Advantages

by Giles Strong

Welcome to the final instalment of my series on neural networks. If you’re just joining us, previous parts are here, here, and here.

Last time we looked at how we can could fix some of the problems that were responsible for limiting the size of networks we could train. Here we will be covering some additions we can make to the models in order to further increase their power. Having learnt how to build powerful networks, we will also look into why exactly neural-networks can be so much more powerful than other methods.

My First Time at CMS

by Alessia Saggio

Every year, my university organizes a trip to CERN for Bachelor’s students only, to give them the chance to get acquainted with the world of Particle Physics before starting the Master. This year I was one of the three PhD students who accompanied them, and I thought it would be nice to share my feelings here with you since it was a really nice experience.

In fact, it was my fourth time at CERN, but despite that I had never had the chance to visit the CMS detector, the experiment

Analysis of Italian Roads

by Greg Kotkowski

It is said that “all roads lead to Rome”. Is it true anymore? Certainly, during the Roman Empire main roads were constructed in such the way that everybody could easily reach the capital, the political and economical center of the country. Therefore if roads are built in order to facilitate the transportation toward the most important hubs, they could be used as an indicator of a region’s importance.

I downloaded the data of all contemporary roads in Italy from the OSM. As a starter, it is worth to plot them all (see Figure 1). It is