Science Hack Day uses CMS data
Science Hack events: a new way for scientists, designers and other techno-savvy people to interact. The most recent Science Hack Day was held in San Francisco and with it the CMS collaboration found an original and simple way to present its data. Science Hack events: a new way for scientists, designers and other techno-savvy people to interact. The most recent Science Hack Day was held in San Francisco and with it the CMS collaboration found an original and simple way to present its data.
Participants in the CMS hack event. (Photo credit: Morris Mwanga.)
First of all, you need to know what “hack” means. A hack is a quick solution to a problem, often the cleverest one if not the most elegant. So, a Science Hack Day is a 48-hour all-night event that brings together “hackers” to create innovative solutions to scientific problems.
This year’s event was held in San Francisco from 12 to 13 November and was a huge success! It hosted around 150 science “hackers” from five continents, and presented challenging events from different scientific fields. In the “LHC Data Hack” event, results from CMS presented “hackers” with a tough challenge: presenting this scientific analysis in a way that allows people to learn, create art or even come up with new science.
The group that accepted the LHC challenge was made up of people from surprisingly different backgrounds, from science to art and engineering. Together they created a website that demonstrates and explains a very complex LHC dataset to a general audience. To do so, they decided to create two histograms that depicted parts of the analysis process. A day later, the hacking stopped and the “LHC team” had managed to finish its projects in the stipulated time.
So there it is: creative, clever and awe-inspiring innovations created in only a weekend in an amazing collaboration of science and technology. So if you’re a coder, designer, scientist, hacker or just an enthusiastic person with good ideas, Science Hack Day is for you!
Click here to read CMS News' coverage of the hack event.
