A Lecture on Artificial Intelligence in Hamburg

by Tommaso Dorigo

Are you going to be in the Hamburg (Germany) area on July 7th? Then mark the date! The AMVA4NewPhysics and INSIGHTS ITN networks have jointly organized, with the collaboration of the DESY laboratories and the Yandex school of machine learning, a public lecture titled “Artificial Intelligence: past, present, and future“. The lecturer is Prof. Pierre Baldi, from the Center for Machine Learning at the University of California Irvine.
The venue is the auditorium (horsaal) of the

Q & A on AMVA4NewPhysics

by Tommaso Dorigo

It is a very good thing that the European Commission pays close attention to document the work of the projects that benefited of its funding. So, for instance, the AMVA4NewPhysics network has been described, along with its goals, in a 2016 article on the Horizon magazine.

Since the network is nearing the end of its lifetime, I was asked to provide some information for an update of the above article. I think it is useful to share the questions and my own answers below. Of course, the mentions I made below of some of the network output are only a partial representation, and are

Accelerating the search for Dark Matter with Machine Learning

by Tommaso Dorigo

The topic of algorithms that may dramatically improve our statistical inference from collider data is dear to my heart, and has been so since at least two decades (my first invention, which has now become what is called the “inverse bagging” algorithm, is dated 1992, when nobody even knew what bagging was). But now _everybody_ appears to be interested in the topic, and that means all of my particle physics and astroparticle physics colleagues.

A way to gauge the interest of the community on this topic is the number of gatherings to discuss advancements in the field and their impact in experimental research in fundamental science. If I look back at just the past few months,

600 Attend to Outreach Event in Venice Lido

by the AMVA4NewPhysics press office

On Saturday, July 8th, the “Sala Perla” of the Palazzo del Casinò was crowded by 600 attendees, who filled all seats and then some. The event, titled “Universo: tempo zero – breve storia dell’inizio”, was organized in conjunction with the international EPS conference, which takes place until this Wednesday at Lido of Venice, and was sponsored by the AMVA4NewPhysics network. It featured a discussion between the anchor, Silvia Rosa Brusin, and a few guests: Fabiola Gianotti, general director of CERN; Antonio Masiero, vice-president of INFN; and Mirko Pojer, responsible of operations of the LHC collider. The program was enriched by a few videos, and by readings by Sonia Bergamasco and jazz music by Umberto Petrin.

At the start of the evening, the Venice high-school students who won the “Art&Science” contest were given prizes (consumer electronics and gadgetry) offered by AMVA4NewPhysics as well as plaques with certificates. The winners, Martina Ciampi and Elena Murer, received in addition to the gadgets and the

Art & Science 38: Boson Motion

by the AMVA4NewPhysics press office

Elisa Brocca and Emma Troni, two students from Liceo “G.B. Benedetti”, are the authors of the video titled “Boson Motion”. The students captured the video as a succession of frames that try to picture the collision of two LHC protons with coloured balls, and to explain the motion of massive and massless particles in the presence of the Higgs boson field. The result is a fun animation.

The Art & Science contest is coming to a close, as tomorrow evening

Art & Science 34: Untitled

by the AMVA4NewPhysics press office

Leonardo Cosma, Francesco Turcato and Nicola Vianello, from Liceo “G.B. Benedetti” in Venice are the authors of a untitled work that they composed using a Newton pendulum, glass, and a mirror in a metal frame.

The idea of particles moving and breaking glass appears in this work as in the one presented in the previous post. Here, however, the idea is to show the dynamics of the interaction between colliding bodies, which can be

Art & Science 29: The Boson Theatre

by the AMVA4NewPhysics press office

 The title of this surprising sculpture is “Il teatro del bosone” (the boson theatre). It is the work of three high-school students of Liceo “Benedetti” in Venice who, like many of their peers, decided to render in a three-dimensional way the colourful particle collision images they had been shown during the initial seminars of the “Art & Science” project. At variance from other teams, however, they found a rather interesting solution to the three-dimensional challenge.

The team assembled layers of plexiglass over which they painted drops of colours, as if taking snapshots of particles exiting the collision point at different

Art & Science 28: Higgs’ Christmas

by the AMVA4NewPhysics press office

Mariam Taufiq and Denzel Aragd, two students of Liceo “Benedetti” in Venice, are the authors of the work presented here. For some reason they found some connection between the LHC proton-proton collisions that give rise to the production of Higgs bosons and the festivities of Christmas, and they decided to create an artwork that puts the two things together.

Their canvas shows an explosion of white and cyan over a

Art & Science 19: The Human Machine

by the AMVA4NewPhysics press office

With this post we reach the 50% mark in this series, as the number of works by Venice high-school students who participate in the Art & Science contest is 38. The work titled “L’umana macchina” (the human machine) is a creation of Geremia Sassetto and Emma Bastianini, from Liceo Benedetti. They realized it with clay and iron wire.

I think their work is quite commendable as the object has a