Milan

Applications are open for the Italian National PhD in AI:

phd-ai-society.di.unipi.it/applications

National PhDs are centralized programs, where applications are collected by a single institution (in this case, the University of Pisa), while students carry out their research at a range of participating institutions. In particular, this year there are two positions titled “Accelerating Physics Research Using Artificial Intelligence”, funded by INFN (the Italian National Institute for Nuclear Physics). These positions can be hosted by any research group affiliated with INFN, including my own. If you’re interested in applying, please send me an email!

In the past few months, we’ve been setting up a new computer cluster called redfive (why redfive?…). Right now, it consists of a login node and five compute nodes, totaling about 100 CPUs. It is developed and maintained entirely in-house (mostly by Rodrigo Tenorio and Federico De Santi, while I prepare coffee during their admin sessions!), which is great fun. It’s not meant to substitute a supercomputer, of course, but rather to provide a simple, easy-to-expand, no-queuing setup for mid-sized jobs, as well as a way to introduce students to remote servers. We need a GPU now!

Congrats to Leonardo Toti, who defended his MSc degree yesterday with a research project with us. Leonardo worked with Alex Toubiana on improving the robustness of testing GR with gravitational-wave data (waveform systematics are a tricky business indeed). Leonardo will move on with a PhD at IFAE in beautiful Barcelona, Spain.