Yandex School of Data Analysis joins CERN experiment

Earlier this week Yandex, the Russian search giant, announced that its School of Data Analysis (YSDA) will take part in CERN’s Large Hadron Collider beauty (LHCb) experiment. The project, which is one of four large particle detector experiments at the Large Hadron Collider, collects data to study the interactions of heavy particles, called b-hadrons.

As a result of this collaboration, the LHCb researchers will benefit from such  applications as EventIndex and EventFilter as well as from new, specially designed YSDA services.

The Yandex analysts will “contribute their data processing skills and capabilities, and perform interdisciplinary research and development on the edge of physics and data science that will serve the aims and needs of the LHCb experiment,” according to the Russian company.

LHCb experiment. Photo by Tim Parchikov.

“The researchers at the LHCb experiment are seeking, among other things, to explain the imbalance of matter and antimatter in the observable universe. This programme requires collecting, processing and analysing a very large amount of data,” explains Yandex.

A multifaceted partnership since 2011

Yandex and CERN started their collaboration in 2011 when the LHCb experiment began using the Russian company’s servers for part of the experiment’s data simulation production.

In early 2012, the Russian company launched a search tool service for retrieving LHC Events at CERN. The search service had been designed specifically for the the LHCb experiment studying the interactions of b-hadrons, heavy particles containing the bottom quark, also known as the beauty quark.

In 2013, Yandex became an associate member of the Open Lab of CERN, whose researchers were offered to use the company’s computing capabilities and data processing technologies. For example, CERN used MatrixNet, Yandex’s flagship machine learning solution, to analyze the decay of unstable subatomic particles called mesons. In exchange, Yandex got broader access to the results of CERN experiments for further improvements of its own technologies.

In July of last year, Yandex announced the participation of its School of Data Analysis in the preparation of SHIP (Search for Hidden Particles), a CERN experiment to confirm the existence of dark matter.

From hardcore mathematics to computational linguistics

The YSDA has a strong tradition in hard-core mathematics and experience in converting new theoretical knowledge into practical solutions. It is the only member of the LHCb collaboration that does not specialize in physics. Other collaborators in the project include such prestigious institutions as the MIT (USA), EPFL (Switzerland), University of Oxford and Imperial College, London (UK).

The Yandex School of Data Analysis is a free Master’s-level program in computer science and data analysis, offered by Yandex since 2007 to graduates in engineering, mathematics, computer science or related fields. Its program includes courses in machine learning, data structures and algorithms, computational linguistics and other related subjects. It runs a number of joint programs, both at Master’s and PhD levels, with leading Russian education and research institutions.