Forty students were selected from over 1600 applicants for this year’s CERN openlab summer-student programme. On 13 and 15 August, they presented the projects they have been working on over the past two months in a series of five-minute “lighting talks”.

Through these projects, the students have been working hands-on with a range of cutting-edge computing technologies, including machine learning, data analytics, neuromorphic computing and much more.

The students’ talks — in which they briefly outlined the results of their work, as well as the technical hurdles they have had to overcome — are available to watch on CDS (first session; second session).

A panel of judges highlighted a number of talks that were particularly impressive:

• First place: Hamza Javed – Fast inference on FPGAs (field-programmable gate arrays) for trigger systems in high-energy physics
• Second place: Raghav Kansal – Deep graph neural networks for fast HGCAL (high-granularity calorimeter) simulation
• Third place: Bartlomiej Borzyszkowski – Neuromorphic computing in high-energy physics

The judges also picked out presentations by Priyanka Mathur and Riccardo Maganza for special mention.

“Through my project, I gained new skills and improved my understanding of FPGAs, and developed new architectures for them,” says Hamza. “I had some amazing supervisors who were supportive throughout my project and I made some amazing friends among my fellow CERN openlab students. This was, undoubtedly, the best summer of my life.”

In addition to their projects, the students also participated in a range of other exciting activities. They took part in a dedicated series of lectures related to IT topics at CERN, participated in a special hackathon, and went on a trip to Zurich. During this trip, they visited ETH Zurich and the offices of CERN openlab members IBM and OpenSystems. At CERN, visits were organised to the CMS experiment, the Antimatter Factory, the Synchrocyclotron, the CERN Control Centre, the SM18 magnet-testing facility and the CERN Data Centre.

“CERN openlab plays an important role in CERN’s educational mission, particularly through this IT-focused summer-student programme,” says Frédéric Hemmer, head of CERN’s IT department. “It is always a pleasure to see these passionate young students come here and bring fresh perspectives to the Laboratory.”

If you are interested in applying to next year’s CERN openlab summer-student programme, please visit this webpage for further information. Applications will open later this year.