The challenge runs from May 12th to September 2014.
From the challenge:
In a nutshell, we provide a data set containing a mixture of simulated signal and background events, built from simulated events provided by the ATLAS collaboration at CERN. Competitors can use or develop any algorithm they want, and the one who achieves the best signal/background separation wins! Besides classical prizes for the winners, a special “HEP meets ML” prize will also be awarded with an invitation to CERN; we are also seeking to organise a NIPS workshop.
For this HEP challenge we deliberately picked one of the most recent and hottest playgrounds: the Higgs decaying into a pair of tau leptons. The first ATLAS results were made public in december 2013 in a CERN seminar, ATLAS sees Higgs boson decay to fermions. The simulated events that participants will have in their hands are the same that physicists used. Participants will be working in realistic conditions although we have simplified quite a bit the original problem so that it became tractable without any background in physics.
HEP physicist, even ATLAS physicists, who have experience with multivariate analysis, neural nets, boosted decision trees and the like are warmly encouraged to compete with machine learning experts.
The Laboratoire de l’Accélerateur Linéaire (LAL) is a French lab located in the vicinity of Paris. It is overseen by both the CNRS (IN2P3) and University Paris-Sud. It counts 330 employees (125 researchers and 205 engineers and technicians) and brings internationally recognized contributions to experimental Particle Physics, Accelerator Physics, Astroparticle Physics, and Cosmology.
Contact : for any question of general interest about the challenge, please consult and use the forum provided on the Kaggle web site. For private comments, we are also reachable at higgsml_at_lal.in2p3.fr.
Now there is a machine learning challenge for the summer!
Not to mention more science being done on the basis of public data sets.
Be sure to forward this to both your local computer science and physics department.