Involving other communities through challenges and cooperation
Abstract
The ATLAS collaboration has recently setup three projects targeting citizen science or specific communities :
The goal of the HiggsML project was to bring particle physicists and data scientist together by a “challenge”: compete online to obtain the best Higgs to tau tau signal significance on a set of ATLAS fully simulated signal and background. The challenge ran from May to September 2014, drawing considerable attention. 1785 teams participated, making it the most popular challenge ever on the Kaggle platform.
Higgs Hunters is the first Particle Physics project hosted on a web-based citizen science platform called Zooniverse. Volunteers are asked to scan ATLAS data and Monte Carlo events, looking for secondary vertices. Results will be compared to the ATLAS secondary vertex finding algorithm in the context of the search for long lived particles in Supersymmetric models. So far more than 5,000 users have taken part, classifying more than 600,000 interesting features in ATLAS event displays.
The ATLAS @ home project allows volunteers to run simulations of collisions in the ATLAS detector. During the first year the community essentially consisted of software fans, who were attracted by the technical challenge and contributed a lot to the debugging via message boards. With the start of LHC, the number of people attracted for outreach reasons is growing.
In this talk, the setup, current success and future of such projects are reviewed.