Current Activities
Summer 2024 ~ Visiting Faculty at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab in the Physics and X-Ray Science Group
The Department of Energy's Office of Science has awarded a $600,000 grant, made possible through the Funding for Accelerated, Inclusive Research (FAIR) initiative, to Youngstown State University's Alina Lazar, professor of Computer Science. Lazar's project, entitled "Investigating Large-Scale Models for High-Energy Physics Pattern Recognition," is a collaborative effort with Paolo Calafiura, senior scientist from the Computing Sciences Area at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL).
The primary focus of this project is pattern recognition in the context of high-density particle 3D point datasets. This capability is essential for advancing High Energy Physics experiments in the upcoming generation. However, the conventional tracking algorithms used for this purpose present many computational challenges when applied to large-scale projects. To address this, the project aims to develop algorithms that efficiently handle the training and inference processes for Graph Neural Networks used in particle tracking within High Energy Physics applications. Furthermore, the knowledge gained from this research may extend beyond its immediate domain and find applications in other areas, such as scene reconstruction for autonomous vehicles.