The twelfth edition of “Quark Confinement and the Hadron Spectrum“, a particle physics conference specialized in QCD and Heavy Ion physics, will be held in Thessaloniki this year, from August 29th to September 3rd. And the AMVA4NewPhysics network, the EU ITN I designed and coordinate, is among the sponsors of the event.

The reason of the sponsorship is simple to explain: the conference will host a session devoted to “Statistical methods for physics analysis in the XXIth century“. The Scientific Coordinator of the network, yours truly, will chair that session. Several talks of relevance to the activities of the network have been scheduled in the session, and at least three network members will give invited talks there. It is also useful to mention that Technical University of Munich (TUM), one of the network partners, is among the organizers.

(Above, the logos of the sponsors of the conference)

A session on statistical methods is a bit of an experiment for a particle physics conference. Usually the “specialized” topics it contains (unfolding, confidence intervals, bump hunting techniques, averaging physical quantities, LEE corrections, classification algorithms, use of GPUs in hypothesis testing, etcetera) are only found in ad-hoc events which, while successful, usually fail to involve the majority of the particle physicists community. In this case, an attempt will be made to create attention to those topics even among those attendees who believe they “do not need statistics knowledge” to do physics analyses.

Among the invited speakers who have confirmed their contribution to the Statistics session of QCHS XII there are colleagues who have distinguished themselves with their knowledge of the matter, like Eilam Gross, Luca Lista, Harrison Prosper, Sergey Gleyzer, Stefan Schmitt. And let me also mention here, in passing, that Luca Lista has recently published a very nice book titled “Statistical Methods for Data Analysis in Particle Physics” with Springer. An advisable read! The cover of the book is shown on the right.

The participation of the AMVA4NewPhysics network also has a broader scope, as the plan is to couple the event with public conferences, also co-organized by the network. One of the goals of our consortium is, in fact, to engage the general public and to do outreach. In summary, there are enough reasons to look forward to late August for a very interesting event in Thessaloniki!