Sally Abou Melhem, Office of Communications, media@aub.edu.lb
This October, AUB received the official acceptance letter from the European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN, stating that AUB is now a cooperating institute in the CMS Experiment. This step for AUB, which reflects its commitment to research ascendancy, student advancement, and global partnerships, came after around one year of mutual visits, technical discussions, and presentations that involved professors from various faculties at AUB, experts from AUB’s IT department, and researchers from CMS-CERN.
The CMS experiment is part of CERN, and consists of a unique general-purpose particle detector that allows scientists and engineers to make new discoveries and identify new phenomena that can ultimately help answer questions related to what the universe is made of and how it works. The CMS experiment is one of the largest international scientific collaborations involving thousands of researchers from around 200 institutions coming from over 40 countries.
As a cooperating institute, AUB will be joining a group of leading universities and research centers from around the world working together on advancing scientific research and discovery. Professors, graduate and senior undergraduate students from physics, computer science, computational sciences, and engineering will have the opportunity to work with peers on cutting-edge projects at the CMS-CERN facilities in France and Switzerland. In addition, AUB researchers will have remote access to massive amounts of experimental data and to state-of-the-art high performance computing infrastructure that will facilitate advanced research in the fields of machine learning and big data analytics.
AUB will be jointly organizing with CMS-CERN a cyber-security national day during January 2019 hosting local and international experts from academia and industry. This will be followed, during 2019, by launching the first joint project between researchers from both institutions, organizing a joint short course at AUB on data analysis in particle physics, and sending the first cohort of AUB students to the summer internship program at CMS-CERN.