Deliverable 4.2 Is Out

by Tommaso Dorigo

I am happy to report that an important new product of the AMVA4NewPhysics ITN is now public. This is generically titled “Report on a Statistical Learning Method for Model-Independent Searches for New Physics“, and labeled D4.2 as per the grant agreement we signed with the European Union. The document is available at the following link:

http://www.pd.infn.it/%7Edorigo/D4.2.pdf

What is this document about ? It is a description of the studies for the development of a software package aiming at automating the searches for new physics in LHC data, by evidencing anomalous clusterings of events that are hard to explain with known physics processes. I am sure that Fabricio and Grzegorz, the two main developers of the software (Deliverable 4.3, available on github at https://github.com/Grzes91/PenalizedAD) and its documentation (D4.2) will be happy to post in this blog a more complete description of the new package and its possible uses in particle physics research.

Adjusting hyper-parameters: First step into Bayesian optimisation of DNNs

by Giles Strong

A few months ago I wrote about some work I was doing on improving the way a certain kind of particle is detected at CMS, by replacing the existing algorithm with a neural network. I recently resumed this work and have now got to the point where I show significant improvement over the existing method. The design of the neural network, however, was one that I imported from some other work, and what I want to do is to adjust it to better suit my problem.

The L1 muon trigger algorithms

by Ioanna Papavergou

The last CMS week of the year was held two weeks ago, summarizing all the upgrades and changes that happened in 2017, but also the plans of the groups for 2018. Since my service work concerns the L1 muon trigger performance, I was asked by the data performance group conveners to give a talk about the muon trigger algorithms and the improvements that happened last year.

What if you want to get your analysis published?

by Pietro Vischia

I have spent the last few hours editing a paper for an analysis I have been working on with some colleagues in the last year, and I am so bored that I stopped for a few minutes to tell you how preparing a paper in a large experimental collaboration works.

The power of conciseness

by Pietro Vischia

On this blog, I have 10 blog posts in a draft state; some of them are at a somehow advanced stage, some of them have only the title and a general outline of the topic.

Almost all of them have been sitting there for months. Why?

Well, it turns out I want to pack a lot of content in a single post. My past posts are average long, and I put quite some work into them. The issue starts when I begin to be submerged by various tasks, but it is not a matter of lack of time: it is a matter of motivation friction.

One Year in Review

by Tommaso Dorigo

Christmas is coming, and with it a temporary stop of working activities for most of us- but not all, as the world does not stop spinning, nor do electrons in the computers that crunch LHC datasets in search for new physics. As for academics, they leave their offices with piles of articles to review and grant proposals to write, knowing that their mailboxes will not stop filling up during the winter break. But it’s a jolly time nonetheless 😉

IASA – Accelerating science in Athens

by Kostas Vellidis

IASA stands for Institute of Accelerating Systems and Applications – a mouthful indeed. IASA is a relative rarity in Greece: it is a private non-profit research institute. A number of those University Research Institutes (URI), or, in the original (to help you refresh your math characters) Ερευνητικά Πανεπιστημιακά Ινστιτούτα (ΕΠΙ), were established in the 90s, in an effort to promote research and postgraduate studies in the Greek University system by providing specialized infrastructure and/or expertise.