CERN offers prizes to develop algorithms to study Higgs boson

Researchers at CERN, and several other organisations, are offering cash prizes to citizen scientists who can develop machine-learning techniques to improve analysis of Higgs boson data.
The Higgs boson machine learning challenge will reward the winners with up to USD 7,000 in cash.
The discovery of the Higgs boson, which is responsible for giving all particles their mass, was confirmed on July 4, 2012.
But for physicists, the discovery of a new particle is just the beginning of a long and difficult quest to meticulously measure its characteristics and determine if it fits their model of matter, said CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, in a statement.

A key property of any particle is how often it decays into other particles.
The ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN searches for new particles and processes using head-on collisions of protons of extraordinarily high energy.

The ATLAS experiment has recently observed a signal of the Higgs boson decaying into two tau particles, but this decay is a small signal buried in background noise.
The goal of the Higgs boson machine-learning challenge is to explore the potential of advanced machine-learning methods to improve the analysis of data produced by the experiment.
Machine learning is a branch of artificial intelligence in which computers are trained to recognise patterns in data. The machines learn to recognise elements of data sets and can then apply this to new, unseen data.

For the challenge, no knowledge of particle physics is required. Using simulated data with features characterising events detected by ATLAS, the task is to classify events into "tau tau decay of a Higgs boson" versus "background."
The contest will end in September and successful participants will receive cash prizes.
The first place prize is USD 7,000, second place is USD 4,000, and third place is USD 2,000, according to wired.Com.
The winning method may eventually be applied to real data and the winners may be invited to CERN to discuss their results with high-energy physicists.
Organisations involved in the challenge include Google, The Center for Data Science of Paris-Saclay, and INRIA, a French research institute of computer science, among others.