AMVA4NewPhysics Kick-Off meeting

Welcome (Paris Sphicas, CERN)Orientative introduction (T. Dorigo, INFN)

CERN, September 16th 2015

Welcome !

Contents

• Our goals• The network structure• Work packages and deliverables• Meetings and events• Web page• Social media

Our goalsI think we should start by reminding ourselves of what brought us here today. As stated in our proposal, our goals are the following:

• Objective 1: 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. [...] 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.

Objective 2: 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 [...] The training of talented students undertaking graduate studies in HEP and focusing on those software applications therefore represents an ideal platform for the creation of bridges with other disciplines, allowing for a transfer of knowledge and experience and offering clear benefits to society, while providing the trainees with attractive work options outside academia. [...]

•Objective 3: Deepen our knowledge of Nature by providing answers to fundamental physics questions with the LHC. [...] The proponents' vast experience in Higgs physics, top quark physics, and in extensive searches for new physics is a guarantee that the network will focus in synergy on the most critical questions to which the LHC experiments are in the position of providing an answer in the next decade.

Network structure• Eight beneficiary nodes: INFN, Oxford U., U.

Blaise Pascal, U. C. Louvain, LIP, IASA, U. Padova, CERN

• Six partners (two academic, four industrial): EPFL, U.C. Irvine, B12 Consulting, SDG, Mathworks, Yandex– a seventh (TUM) has just been added!

• Coordinated by T.Dorigo (deputy P.Checchia), INFN

• Managed by:– Supervisory Board (chair D.Bortoletto, UOXF)

• all node PIs are members with voting rights• will include one ESR representative

– Executive Board (chair T.Dorigo)• seats WP leaders: Bortoletto, Donini, Maltoni,

Menardi, Dorigo • Officers: Equal Opportunities (N. Saoulidou), Training

and Events (T. Carli), Outreach (P. Vischia)

• Plus a soon-to-be-created press office for the network at INFN-PD– hiring a person to organize it– contributed by coordinator and by Outreach

Officer

Work Packages• Our action is divided in 7 work packages

– WP1: Higgs– WP2: New Physics– WP3: ME developments– WP4: Statistical Learning tools– WP5: Career development– WP6: Outreach– WP7: Management

• Useful to map the action with the help of a table outlining the ESRs man-month involvement in the various projects

We all know we are able to deliver Higgs measurements and searches of new physics in ATLAS and CMS

The real challenge is of a different nature: a big chunk of our activity is expected to be the development of new SL tools

Will we manage to do that ? Note that every ESR (except those working on ME developments) will have to contribute to WP4. A lot of the network’s synergy is built on that concept.

MeetingsThis is the first of a series of meetings which we will hold with 6-months cadence, to get together and organize the progress of our network’s program.

This time we meet for only one afternoon; in future events we will probably move to an “afternoon + dinner + morning” format to accommodate a restricted session of the Supervisory Board, and to allow for more time to discuss and organize the work in the various work packages

Tentative sites of next meetings: INFN-Padova (i.e.,Venice?), Athens, Lisbon, Louvain, CERN

Besides these “all-network” meetings, we will also hold (by videoconference only) monthly meetings of the Executive Board and topical meetings of nodes collaborating to specific tasks

The network also foresees a number of other events where we will get together: workshops in Outreach, in Statistics, on Roostats, on MadGraph, on MatLab, plus schools and other training events for the students

Training events summary

• We have promised to the EU a significant number of events where we will train our ESRs– Many of these are organized externally and we take advantage of their prior existence,

e.g.• INFN and IN2P3 Schools of Statistics (3 events)• Erice School of Science Journalism (2 events)• UNIPD Master in Science Communication• INFN school in Parallel Computing• YNDX School of data analysis

– Yet we will try to contribute to these events (also financiarily)

• Then we have several events we must organize ourselves:– Statistics Workshop on Machine Learning (UNIPD+INFN)– Workshop in Science Outreach (CERN)– Workshops in Soft Skills (UOXF)– Workshop in Madgraph (UCL)– MatLab course (CERN)– Workshop in RooStats (CERN)– Invited lectures by statisticians (UNIPD)

Secondments• We promised a strong synergy through the thick exchange of students who are hosted at

other sites• This will be the real connective tissue of the network• I expect that the PIs and the other participants will make all efforts to give the peak of

their contribution to analysis and development during the periods when ESRs are hosted at their institution – so plan ahead ! (actual times of secondments may be negotiable, but...)

Our Web PageThe network’s web page is hosted by INFN-PD at http://www.pd.infn.it/AMVA4NewPhysics/index.html– Contains information on the network and participants, calls for applications, and links to

events– plus a private section accessible by password, storing meeting minutes and network

documents• Ask me for user and password to private area

– About 50 hits/day since July• Please suggest ways to improve / useful links• Please link it from your institutional web pages !!

If you have material useful for the web site please submit it to the press office of the network (currently myself and sabine.hemmer@pd.infn.it):

- links to reading material on MVA and HEP- your calls for applications

- news connected to network activities

Our Dropbox folder• Contains many subfolders, e.g.

– documents for submission, grant agreement, consortium agreement

– meeting slides and minutes– documents describing deliverables and milestones

we produce– data sheets of all participants and nodes– web page files– budget spreadsheets and payment documents

• Not supposed to be used by every member of the network; it is a repository of our documents– PIs have write access and can redistribute the

material within their node if they wish to do so• PIs please be careful to avoid moving or deleting stuff!• Please note that documents are generally confidential;

e.g. the project proposal is not supposed to be distributed

– however if you have a good reason for wanting read access I will grant it, or provide you with the material you need

The twitter hashtag: #AMVA4NP• Along with the blog, it is a deliverable of our project (D6.1)

– I created it in July and have started to post there our advertisements of openings for ESR positions, plus other HEP-related information

• Only few of you appear to have a Twitter account– May I ask you to create one ? It takes a minute

• then please let everybody else know you got it, so we can “follow” each other

– It is not a distracting thing if you use it for your work activities; generally scientists find it very useful

By tweeting about our activities we • do outreach!• improve our training

action• increase our

network of contacts and connections

Toward the creation of the blogThe network blog has not been created yet– It is a deliverable (6.1) due Month 4– We will create it in the course of next month– YOU are expected to blog on

• your research activities (compatibly with confidentiality issues)• if you hear something interesting at a workshop or conference, or hear a seminar• if you have an idea, or a rant, or an opinion

– Remember: the name of the game is to attract attention through the material we post• people interested in science will hang around if you post interesting stuff• if you make it personal, readers will like it more

– By getting visitors to read about science, we all win• we will be judged by the traffic we provide• in fact one milestone is the assessment of the blog success through traffic analysis, on Month

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– The press office and Outreach Officer will act as editors, collect material, bug you to make you write• if each of us writes one post per month we will have more than a post per day, which is

enough to make our blog a very successful site