15–27 Jan 2024
Africa/Johannesburg timezone

 

CHACAL is a new school funded by the French CNRS programme for international collaboration with Africa. It is aimed at PhD students in HEP (early postdocs and advanced masters students considered). It will feature lecturers from leading universities in European and South Africa. The CNRS financing ensures no registration fee, and that we can provide meals and accommodation to participants. There will also be a limited number of bursaries for travel to the school for students within Africa (please apply for this in the registration form).


 
The course will be composed of two weeks of classes for the students. The morning sessions will be devoted to lectures on Monte Carlo Event Generation, Machine Learning, Future Computing (includign Quantum Computing). The afternoons will be reserved for hands-on tutorials and masterclasses in the various techniques which are seen each day, progressively building up the level of the students. The students are expected to begin the course with at least a Masters’ level understanding of mathematics and particle physics, and are expected to leave the course with the following skills: 

 
Understand the Monte Carlo method techniques behind event generation, and know how to generate events in a range of industry-standard event generator programmes;

 
Understand how to use generated events for comparisons with experimental data and in physics analyses, and re-interpretation;Understand the basics of the methods underpinning the most commonly used machine-learning techniques, and how to apply them in an analysis;

 
Form a view of the wider picture of advanced computing in terms of emerging technologies (such as quantum computing) and techniques used in wider industry;  

 
The school has no registration fee, but applicants are required to be working in HEP or related fields.  The school will provide on-site accomodation for students, as well as meals. Travel bursaries up to 500 EUR are available for students coming from within Africa: these can be requested in the registration form.  
 
Lecturers:
Prof. Andy Buckley (University of Glasgow, UK)
Prof. Jon Butterworth (University College London, UK)
Prof. Louie Corpe (Université Clermont Auvergne, France)
Prof. Caterina Doglioni (University of Manchester, UK)
Prof. Benjamin Fuks (Sorbonne Université, Paris and LPHNE, France)
Prof. Heather Gray (University of California, Berkeley, USA)
Prof. Deepak Kar (University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa)
Dr. James Keaveney (University of Cape Town, South Africa)
Dr. Isobel Kolbe (University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa)
Dr. Ana Peixoto (Laboratory of Subatomic Physics & Cosmology, Grenoble, France)
Prof. Francesco Petruccione (Stellenbosch University and NITheCS, South Africa)
Dr. David Rousseau (IJCLab, CNRS/IN2P3 and Université Paris-Saclay, France)
 
 
School organised by:
Deepak Kar (Witwatersrand, SA)
Louie Corpe (Clermont-Ferrand, FR)
Florence Holop, Administrator (Clermont-Ferrand, FR)
Clarisse Prat (Witwatersrand, SA)
Hannah van der Schyf (Witwatersrand, SA)
Wandile Nzuza (Witwatersrand, SA)
Ragnie Leahy, Senior Finance Administrative Officer (Witwatersrand, SA)
Thembisile (Emily) Nkabinde, Administrative Assistant (Witwatersrand, SA)
Maddalena Teixeira, Secreatry (Witwatersrand, SA)





 
Additional support by: iThemba Labs, National Institute for Theoretical and Computational Sciences, SA-CERN Programme, NRF/DSI, University of Witwatersrand, and Université Clermont Auvergne.
Starts
Ends
Africa/Johannesburg
Lectures: iThemba Labs (North) auditorium Tutorials: CAM computing lab