Meet The Mad Scientists Performing Universe-Breaking Experiments

Big things are happening at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. The state-of-the-art intergovernmental research organization is home to the single biggest particle physics laboratory on the planet. CERN’s unparalleled infrastructure and funding from 23 member countries give the organization the unprecedented opportunity to scientifically study some of the biggest, most hard-to-answer questions about the universe, even down to the logistics of the all-encompassing mystery that the Big Bang.

At any given time, CERN has its hands in a number of different scientific endeavors, each loftier and more high-minded than the last. At the moment the Large Hidron Collider–the world’s largest–is almost halfway through a two-year hiatus, but that doesn’t mean that the researchers at CERN have slowed down one bit.

One of the projects currently in the works concerns the future of Artificial Intelligence and its role in the advancement of science. CERN has ambitious plans to upgrade its famous accelerator over the next 20 years in order to push our research capabilities and understanding of physics to historically unprecedented levels, but in order to do so the research organization will need to surpass some enormous computational hurdles.

This is where AI comes into the picture. “Such technologies could, for example, play a role in filtering through hundreds of millions of particle collision events each second to select interesting ones for further study,” says CERN’s own news outlet. “Or they could be used to help spot patterns in monitoring data from industrial control systems and prevent faults before they even arise. Already today, machine-learning approaches are being applied to these areas.”

Playing around with AI is nothing to be taken lightly, however, and CERN is well aware of the potential pitfalls. This is precisely why School of Computer Science at University College Dublin in Ireland assistant professor Vivek Nallur was invited to CERN to give a talk about “consequentialist ethics, virtue ethics and deontological ethics”.

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