A week with Nobel Laureates

by Giovanni Banelli

I’m on the plane for Boston, where on Monday I will start my MathWorks internship, i.e. the secondment planned within my AMVA4NewPhysics position. It’s 10PM in the Central European Time, but outside it’s still very bright. Tiredness cannot be hidden. Just this morning I left my hotel in Lindau, where I attended the 2019 Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting on Physics (Sunday June 30th – Friday July 5th).

Advanced Results in Lisbon

by Tommaso Dorigo

This week the VII AMVA4NewPhysics workshop is under way in the premises of LIP in Lisbon. During these events the network gets together to discuss the status of the various projects, plan future events and activities, take action on arisen issues, and vote on budget and other topics. But this is a special event in the lifetime of the network, as we are getting toward the mature stage – we are in the 

Science in the sun: AMVA4NP’s summer events

by Giles Strong

Summer 2018’s been a busy time for the AMVA4NewPhysics network; we’ve had workshops, outreach events, training sessions, meetings, and many more things. I wanted to go through and pick out a few thinks I was involved in.

Science taken wide

 

by Giovanni Banelli

Hi everyone, my name is Giovanni Banelli and I’m the last student joining the AMVA4NewPhysics network. I will be based in Munich (Technical University) and formally I’m the only theorist among the ESRs; hence I will be working on the theory/phenomenology side of the use of advanced statistical tools in searches for New Physics.

Fashionable researcher

by Greg Kotkowski

Usually, fashion and science are like the opposite sides of a magnet – if one is important then the other is left behind. Let us add up the odds and take some thoughts about the aspects of a PhD student’s physical appearance. It is quite peculiar that I mention this subject, because I don’t care much about my look. Specifically, let me mention hairdressing. Not the last trends, as I know absolutely nothing about the subject, but rather the problem of getting a haircut abroad.

Higgs Hacking

by Giles Strong

A few days before I returned from CERN at the beginning of the month, I attended a talk on the upcoming TrackML challenge. This is a competition beginning this month in which members of the public will be invited to try and find a solution to the quite tricky problem of accurate reconstruction of particle trajectories in the collisions at the LHC. The various detectors simply record the hits where particles pass by, however to make use of this data, the hits in surrounding detector layers must be combined into a single flight path, called a track.

Staying at CERN

by Giles Strong

Bonjour! As I write, I’m three weeks into my month long secondment at CERN, near Geneva. CERN, home to the Large Hadron Collider, is the world’s largest particle-physics research centre. It is also the location of the CMS experiment, which I work on.

Having a taste of business

by Greg Kotkowski

I have spent the last three months in the SDG company in Milan for my private sector secondment, which is a part of my contract. During this time I was able to have a closer look at how it is to work in a consulting company and to put my hands on real business problems. Herein, I want to summarise some of my experiences and deliberate on the R language – an inseparable friend of statisticians.

Efficiency revisited

by Giles Strong

Cover photo unrelated – it’s just some rad fractal broccoli.

Just over one and a half years ago I wrote a post on some of the tips and tricks I’d found useful in trying to organise myself and improve my efficiency. Searching for a post topic, it was suggested that I revisit this to compare how my workload and approaches have changed, so here goes!