To Make Fairer AI, Physicists Peer Inside Its Black Box

Physicists built the Large Hadron Collider to study the inner workings of the universe. Inside a 27-kilometer underground ring straddling the French-Swiss border, the machine smashes protons together at nearly the speed of light to produce--fleetingly--the smallest constituent building blocks of nature. Sifting through snapshots of these collisions, LHC researchers look for new particles and scrutinize known ones, including their most famous find, in 2012: the Higgs boson, whose behavior explains why other fundamental particles like electrons and quarks have mass. Less well known is the intricate software engine that powers such discoveries. With particle collisions occurring at approximately a billion times per second, the facility generates about 40 terabytes of data per second, according to LHC physicist Maurizio Pierini.