SemiWiki.com - The Higgs Boson and Machine Learning

Technology in and around the LHC can sometimes be a useful exemplar for how technologies may evolve in the more mundane world of IoT devices, clouds and intelligent systems. I wrote recently on how LHC teams manage Big Data; here I want to look at how they use machine learning to study and reduce that data. The reason high-energy physics needs this kind of help is to manage the signal-to-noise problem. Of O(1012) events/hour only 300 produce Higgs bosons. Real-time pre-filtering significantly reduces this torrent of data to O(106) events/hour but that s still a very high noise level for a 300 event signal.