Active inactivity

My introductory post, Welcome to This New Beginning, came on February 19th, 2018. The day of tomorrow will mark 10 months from that moment; should I feel bad about it?

Yes and no.

Let me explain. I had started this project out of frustration and of the need of having a new haven where to rant about what I really care about, but then stuff piled up and I could not put myself to produce content for this blog. The exception being 4 drafts that are still in a very crude form, and that have been expanded at the staggering rate of about 4 or 5 words every couple months.

As I have been preaching to the AMVA4NewPhysics students (in quality of Outreach Offices of the network), the key for a successful blog is building engagement, and engagement is built in perhaps equal parts by interesting, high-quality content and by a frequent and regular update pace. I would not judge quality by the introductory post (nor by the post you are reading now), so all I am left with is the frequency, which is horrendously low.

Yet this has been a very productive year, in which I found stability in a newfound balance between CMS and non-CMS research and between life and work. I have moved to Belgium in July, and am now a researcher in the Institut de recherche en matématique et physique of Université catholique de Louvain; the institute offers an amazing melting pot of experimental physicists, theoreticians, phenomenologists, and generator folks. I am very excited of being here, and am seeing about bringing to light the non-CMS fruits of this melting pot (from the CMS side, I have worked to an update to the observation paper of ttH production, and most importantly to a paper on WZ cross section measurement and search for anomalous triple gauge couplings that is being submitted to JHEP today or tomorrow).

Most importantly, thanks to the new work gig my girlfriend and I moved in together: we actually got married in September in Belgium (followed by a white-dress party with family and friends in Italy)!

So to speak, Belgium is doing great so far: it gave me an exciting job and an exciting wife!

Now that many things have converged, I hope I will really kick-off this blog with an amazing series of posts! I won’t likely follow up immediately on the four drafts I have, because I am getting excited with the idea of writing a series of posts on De Finetti’s definition of probability, so I will most likely start from those. But you never know; the only certainty so far is that I plan to release the next post before the new year, so I will leave you to calculate your posterior for me to actually release the next post in the timescale I advertized 😀

 

Welcome to This New Beginning

[EDIT: if you want to know what I am up to in a given moment, you can find updated biographical information in the About page. This post will NOT be updated with new affiliations and ventures.]

My name is Pietro, and I have a PhD in physics, but my current main research interest is statistics, with a focus on statistical learning techniques.

In my daily job, I am a researcher in Universidad de Oviedo, Spain, where I work as a particle physicist within the CMS experiment, and am the delegated node PI for the AdvancedMVA4NewPhysics ITN network (you can find me blogging there as well, by the way). I am active in Standard Model (ttH search, WZ cross section, ttbar cross section) and BSM physics (2HDM in the Higgs sector, and SUSY in top sector).

Drawing from my experiences in CMS data analysis, however, I grew fond of statistical techniques, both on the matter of their foundations and on the field of statistical learning. As a consequence, my research focus began to shift from the same usual physics to these more interesting, fundamental, methodological topics. I joined the CMS Statistics Committee, where I found a rich landscape of interesting use cases and a fertile field for discussion. However, there is a specific area of statistics that is rarely applied or discussed in HEP: Bayesian statistics. I felt this is really a pity, so I started roaming extensively this exciting area.

I hope to be able, in this blog, to spark in you some interest for statistical learning and for Bayesian statistics, or at least to give you a good time in reading my random thoughts about these topics.

If you are reading this post, you can safely skip reading the About page, which contains mostly a cut-and-paste of this post, unless you want to find a list of my publications, which is actually present in that page.

Oh, and the look-n-feel of the blog might change a bit in the next days: I am not entirely satisfied with the tinkering I have done so far, so I will most likely tinker with fonts and colours some more.

To conclude, and without further ado, welcome to my new small project: I hope you will enjoy it 🙂