CERN Accelerating science

Nick Ziogas is responsible for Digital Science Applications within CERN’s Knowledge Transfer Group (KT). He has been in this role since 2012. The Knowledge Transfer group’s main mission is to disseminate CERN’s expertise and innovative technologies outside the lab, in priority to the Member State Industry, and thus create societal impact. This mission includes engaging industry in common projects, the management of CERN’s intellectual property (IP) and definition of policies relating to the IP. In the nine years that he has worked with KT, Nick has been at the origin of many exciting, diverse, and often complex projects, which gives him a broad perspective of the challenges involved. Nick holds a BSc is Physics from Imperial College and an MSc in Computer Science from UCL, London.

Lorenzo Moneta is a senior applied physicist at CERN, leading since many years the developments of statistical and data analysis software of the ROOT project, a framework for data processing and storage, born at CERN, which is used to store and process the data by almost all high-energy physics experiments.

He is also responsible for the the machine learning software packages available in ROOT framework, and his interest has been in providing efficient software solutions for using machine learning algorithms in high-energy physics.

He is also a coordinator of the inter-experimental LHC Machine learning group, representing the CERN scientific software group. 

Dr. Jean-Marc Rickli  is the head of global and emerging risks at the Geneva Centre for Security Policy (GCSP) in Geneva, Switzerland. He is also the co-chair of the NATO Partnership for Peace Consortium (PfPC) on Emerging Security Challenges Working Group and a senior advisor for the Artificial Intelligence Initiative at the Future Society. He represents the GCSP in the United Nations in the framework of the Governmental Group of Experts on Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems (LAWS). He is a member of Geneva University Committee for Ethical Research and of the advisory board of Tech4Trust, the first Swiss startup acceleration program in the field of digital trust and cybersecurity. He is also a non-resident fellow in emerging and disruptive technologies and future warfare at TRENDS Research in Abu Dhabi..

Prior to these appointments, Dr. Rickli was an assistant professor at the Department of Defence Studies of King’s College London but based at the Qatar National Defense College in Doha and at the Institute for International and Civil Security at Khalifa University in Abu Dhabi. In 2020, he was nominated as one of the 100 most influential French-speaking Swiss by the Swiss newspaper Le Temps. Dr. Rickli received his PhD in International Relations from Oxford University. His latest book published by Georgetown University is entitled Surrogate Warfare: The Transformation of War in the Twenty-first Century.

Hans Block is part of the artist collective together with Cosima Terrasse and Moritz Riesewieck that combines investigative and scientific research with various forms of creative expression. They develop essays, documentaries, theater productions, lecture performances and radio plays centering on the question of how our concept of man and society is changing in the digital age.

Hans Block is a documentary filmmaker and theater director, musician and author. Together with Moritz Riesewieck, Hans Block developed the film "The Cleaners" about the shadow industry of digital censorship in Manila, which celebrated its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in 2018 and has since been screened at more than 70 international film festivals, in cinemas and on television worldwide. The film was nominated for an Emmy-Award® and the German Television Award and has received numerous international awards, including the "Prix Europa" for the Best European TV documentary 2018 and the Grimme Audience Award 2019. Their TED talk on freedom of expression in times of social networks has reached an audience of millions. In September 2020 their book "The Digital Soul" was published by Goldmann Verlag.

Gary Marcus, scientist, bestselling author, entrepreneur, and AI contrarian, was CEO and Founder of the machine learning startup Geometric Intelligence, recently acquired by Uber. 

As a Professor of Psychology and Neural Science at NYU, he jas published extensively in fields ranging from human and animal behavior to neuroscience, genetics, and artificial intelligence, often in leading journals such as Science and Nature.

As a writer, he contributes frequently to the The New Yorker and TheNew York Times, and is the author of four books, including The Algebraic Mind, Kluge:The Haphazard Evolution of the Human Mind, and The New York Times Bestseller, Guitar Zero, and also editor of the recent book,The Future of the Brain: Essays By The World's Leading Neuroscientists, featuring the 2014 Nobel Laureates May-Britt and Edvard Moser. 

Mark is an experimental particle physicist and science journalist. After cooling moun beam in the UK for his PhD, he switched to neutrino physics to work on the T2K experiment in Japan. He is now deputy editor of CERN courier magazine.

You can follow Mark on twitter @neutrino_mark 

Verena Kain is an accelerator physicist at CERN, supervising students and postdocs and leading the teams running the Super Proton Synchrotron and Low Energy Ion Ring. She has a lot of experience with commissioning and operating accelerators and large facilities - she was one of the Engineers in Charge during the commissioning and operation of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) from 2007 to 2013. Software development for the control room - combining physics and hardware - is one of her responsibilities. She is pushing for automation for higher efficiency, reproducibility and increased flexibility of CERN’s high energy frontier machines and founded the Machine Learning Coffee as informal meeting place to discuss algorithms and problems from diagnostics to reinforcement learning for accelerator control.  Now she is convening the accelerator sector wide ML and data analytics community forum at CERN.

David Rousseau is senior scientist at IJCLab-Orsay, Université Paris-Saclay and CNRS. After a dozen of year designing and implementing many pieces of the CERN Large Hadron Collider ATLAS experiment software, a chance meeting in 2013 with a Machine Learning (what was this?) Computer Scientist decided a new path in his career: develop the interface between High Energy Physics (and science in general) and Machine Learning

He has set-up two HEP and Machine Learning competitions on Kaggle and other platforms (HiggsML for event classification, TrackML for tracking), co-created the ATLAS ML group and now is ATLAS contact in the Interexperiment Machine Learning group.

He has been particularly involved in using generator models for fast and accurate simulation, ML aided reconstruction algorithms and Simulation Based Inference (in the context of Higgs boson physics).

Prof. Vittorio Loreto

SONY Computer Science Laboratories, Paris, France
Sapienza University of Rome, Physics Dept., Rome, Italy
Complexity Science Hub Vienna, Vienna, Austria

Vittorio Loreto is a Full Professor of Physics of Complex Systems at Sapienza University of Rome and Faculty of the Complexity Science Hub, Vienna. He is presently directing the SONY Computer Science Lab in Paris, where he also leads the team of "Innovation, Creativity and Artificial Intelligence". His scientific activity is mainly focused on the statistical physics of complex systems and their interdisciplinary applications. He coordinated several projects at the EU and Italian level. More recently he coordinated the Templeton-funded KREYON project devoted to unfolding the dynamics of innovation and creativity. Loreto has published over 180 papers in internationally refereed journals and conference proceedings and chaired several workshops and conferences. He is a member of the executive committee of the Complex Systems Society.

Twitter: @loretoff

Tony Hey is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, the Association for Computing Machinery, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. At the University of Southampton in the UK, his parallel computing research group designed and built one of the first distributed memory message-passing computers using innovative Inmos transputers. He was later Head of the Electronics and Computer Science Department at Southampton and also Dean of Engineering. In 2005 he was awarded a CBE for Services to Science after leading the UK’s eScience initiative.

After 10 years as Corporate Vice President for Technical Computing in Microsoft in the US, he returned to the UK and has been Chief Data Scientist at STFC’s Rutherford Appleton Laboratory since 2015. He was one of the originators of the MPI message passing standard in 1992 and was awarded the 2019 Lifetime Achievement Award by the International Open Benchmark Council. In 2020 he chaired a US Department of Energy subcommittee that explored ‘the opportunities and challenges from Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning for the advancement of science and technology’ or, as a shorthand, ‘AI for Science’.

Tony Hey is also the co-author of three popular books on science and computing –‘The New Quantum Universe’, ‘Einstein’s Mirror’ and ‘The Computing Universe’ – as well as the well-known  graduate text ‘Gauge Theories in Particle Physics’ with Ian Aitchison. He has just completed editing a new edition of ‘The Feynman Lectures on Computation’.