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The Problem With Peer Review

In a world where misinformation, voluntary or accidental, reigns supreme; in a world where lies...

Interna

In the past few years my activities on this site - but I would say more in general, as the same...

The Probability Density Function: A Known Unknown

Perhaps the most important thing to get right from the start, in most statistical problems, is...

Summer Lectures In AI

Winter is not over yet, but I am already busy fixing the details of some conferences, schools,...

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Tommaso DorigoRSS Feed of this column.

Tommaso Dorigo is an experimental particle physicist, who works for the INFN at the University of Padova, and collaborates with the CMS and the SWGO experiments. He is the president of the Read More »

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Higgs Classification Challenge Status

Higgs Classification Challenge Status

May 27 2014 | comment(s)

I reported here a few days ago about a very nice challenge issued by the ATLAS experiment: find Higgs boson decays to tau lepton pairs in a sample containing signal as well as background events, using a training sample with correct signal and background labels per each event.

The challenge consists of solving a typical classification problem in a highly multidimensional space (30 dimensions) better than all other participants - the metric to judge being an "approximate median significance" of the subset of events that the user classifies as "signal". This is given by the formula

AMS = sqrt {2 * [(s+b+10) * log(1 + s/(b+10)) - s] }
What Next: Conference Highlights

What Next: Conference Highlights

May 23 2014 | comment(s)

I am spending the week in the pleasant resort of La Biodola, in the Elba island. Elba is a beautiful island just off the coast of Tuscany. Here Napoleon was exiled after his abdication in 1814 (he arrived here on May 30th). Exactly 200 years later, 100 Italian researchers have decided to exile themselves here to discuss the future 10 years of accelerator-based experiments, to understand where to "put their money", or better their research activities and efforts.
ATLAS Challenges You: Can You Discover The Higgs ?

ATLAS Challenges You: Can You Discover The Higgs ?

May 19 2014 | comment(s)

I came to know through a social network (I have many colleagues as friends there, and they usually post more useful stuff than cute kittens) that ATLAS has launched a very intriguing competition. One you can participate to, if you have some programming skills; no knowledge of particle physics is needed.

The idea is to ask you to classify as signal (Higgs decay to tau lepton pairs, if you really want to know!) or background (anything that looks similar to it but involves no Higgs boson) a set of 550,000 events, for each of which ATLAS gives you 30 kinematical quantities measured in the detector (it is a simulation, but it's a pretty good approximation of reality).
DZERO: The Top Quark Mass Is 1.6 GeV Higher Than You Guys Say

DZERO: The Top Quark Mass Is 1.6 GeV Higher Than You Guys Say

May 12 2014 | comment(s)

Very recently, a combination of the precise measurements of the mass of the top quark obtained by the CDF and DZERO experiments at the Fermilab Tevatron collider with those produced by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at the CERN LHC collider has been produced, obtaining a result of 173.34 GeV, which surprised nobody -of course- with a very small total error bar: 0.76 GeV, a mere 760 MeV, not even a proton's mass.
The Quote Of The Week - Dark Matter Stopped Before Reaching Us

The Quote Of The Week - Dark Matter Stopped Before Reaching Us

May 09 2014 | comment(s)

"In the case where the dark matter particle is light (less than 1 GeV) and the interactions is either contact or mediated by light (but not massless) particles, there is parameter phase space that cannot be probed by current underground detectors even with substantially lowered energy thresholds. This region of the parameter space can be probed by shallow site detectors with low energy thresholds. However, since in this case dark matter particles will be very effectively stopped if coming upwards (i.e. below the detector), we argue that a search for a daily modulated dark matter signal is probably the best strategy for probing this part of the parameter space."
Prospects For Measuring Higgs Boson Pair Production

Prospects For Measuring Higgs Boson Pair Production

May 06 2014 | comment(s)

This must be the boosted b-jets season... Just a few days ago I discussed here the nice new observation of boosted Z->bb decays pulled off by the ATLAS collaboration using 8-TeV proton-proton collisions recorded in 2012. And today I am pleased to see in the Arxiv a new study by D. Ferreira de Lima, A. Papaefstathiou, and M. Spannowsky on the possibility to measure the pair production of Higgs bosons in their decay to two pairs of b-quark jets.