An MCSP Conversation Series Talk: "Physics in the Second Machine Age" by Dr. Mike McCracken

The MCSP Department invites you to join us for Dr. Mike McCracken's MCSP Conversation Series talk about "Physics in the Second Machine Age: How Machine Learning Enables New Science" on Tuesday, April 27 from 7 - 8PM. If you are part of the RC community, you can find the Zoom links through this page. The complete MCSP Conversation Series schedule can be found here. If you are not part of the RC community, but you would like to join in for a talk, just email rahmoeller@roanoke.edu.

Abstract: Machine Learning (ML) is almost unavoidable in our modern lives — ML models curate our playlists, protect us from fraud, and recognize our speech and faces. Perhaps surprisingly, these applications have much in common with analyses performed in experimental particle physics, the field which studies the fundamental interactions that characterize our Universe. In this talk I will give a conceptual introduction to how ML models using artificial neural networks are developed for classification tasks. I will give a broad overview of the goals of particle physics, and highlight several experiments at the discovery frontier that are made possible by ML approaches.