As stated in the proposal of our ITN, our research objectives are the following:

Develop and improve advanced statistical learning tools for data analysis in particle physics.

The handling of the data produced by the LHC is a challenging task. When reduced to high-level information, the detector readout for a single collision event corresponds to approximately one Megabyte of data, and the typical datasets needed to perform a given measurement or search consist of hundreds of millions of events, bringing the total data size typically handled to the multi-Petabyte range. The unprecedented complexity and wealth of that information calls for the development of entirely new analysis methods on one side and improvements and specialization of the employed statistical learning tools on the other.

Bring together academic and non-academic partners to create innovative training opportunities for talented students in statistical learning, computational tools, and data science.

The demands of more sophisticated analysis algorithms and computational tools posed by frontier HEP research constitute a great opportunity for interdisciplinarity, as the typical problems have a common denominator with the classical problems encountered e.g. in stock market analysis, statistical studies in social sciences, models for weather prediction, and the evaluation of patient risk from the results of clinical tests. The training of talented students undertaking graduate studies in High Energy Physics (HEP) and focusing on those software applications therefore represents an ideal platform for the creation of bridges with other disciplines. It allows for a transfer of knowledge and experience and offers clear benefits to society, while it provides the trainees with attractive work options outside academia. This will create opportunities not offered by typical European doctoral training.

Deepen our knowledge of Nature by providing answers to fundamental physics questions with the LHC.

This is the most important and ambitious objective of AMVA4NewPhysics. The network members have a long and demonstrated tradition of excellence in HEP. Here we only mention two important achievements. Bortoletto, Dorigo, and Sphicas actively participated in the research leading to the discovery and the measurement of the properties of the top quark at the CDF experiment; the above scientists, together with Donini, Varela, Saoulidou and Maltoni, also gave significant contributions to the discovery of the Higgs boson and other important results by ATLAS and CMS. The proponents’ vast experience in Higgs physics, top quark physics, and in extensive searches for new physics is a guarantee that the network will, in synergy, focus on the most critical questions the LHC experiments are in the position of providing an answer to in the next decade.