Dear STEM-Trek,

Wow, David Ojika‘s story is inspiring! I wish I could meet him one day and would love to read his paper “Accelerating High-energy Physics Exploration with Deep Learning.

In many of the workshops I’ve recently attended, central themes have included Deep Learning & ML for data acquisition and reconstruction. These skills will be needed in the exascale era, which is just around the corner.

In fact, I was just reading about a collaboration between CERN and the Square Kilometer Array (SKA) to address burning issues associated with data acquisition, storage, management and analysis for the massive amount of data these two projects will generate. Like Ojika, I think we’d all be wise to acquire skills that will be relevant to the LHC, SKA and future world-class projects.

Note: David Ojika and Badisa were e-introduced by STEM-Trek, and David shared an author’s copy of his paper.

My work at CERN is coming along; the biggest challenge this week was not being able to remotely-access some of the nodes in our cluster. I discovered a problem with SSH (cryptographic network protocol). After troubleshooting, I discovered that a router was down, so I submitted a service ticket to the CERN network admins. While I was waiting for them to resolve the issue, I experimented with virtual machines–configuring them with Puppet and Foreman to see how those tools are used to remotely-manage nodes, and automate repetitive tasks.

On the weekend of July 15, seven of us organized a trip to Paris where we visited the Eiffel Tower, Louvre, Notre Dame Cathedral, and more.

Last weekend, I participated in the CERN summer student “Web Fest.” This was a creative ‘think-tank’ exercise where teams worked together to build web applications that educate people about CERN, physics and the LHC. Some apps involved the use of web technologies to solve public health and other humanitarian problems. It was an amazing experience that led to several sleepless nights. We worked from a restaurant while listening to music, and kept the mood light and creative energy flowing by telling each other jokes and funny stories.

I have only four more weeks at CERN. The time seems to fly!

Kind Regards,

Badisa Mosesane
Undergraduate CS student
University of Botswana

Many thanks to Cray Computing for supporting Badisa Mosesane’s round-trip flight from Gabarone to Geneva where participated in CERN’s eight-week international summer school.