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January 21, 2013

Russia's Top Search Engine, Yandex Joins CERN Project

By Rich Steeves, TMCnet Web Editor

CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is world famous for pushing the boundaries of science. It’s the world’s largest particle physics laboratory, home to the robust hadron collider, and a key plot point in Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons. Another of its high-tech projects is called openlab, a framework to test advanced technologies. The institute has selected Yandex (News - Alert), Russia’s biggest search engine, to provide computing resources and process data.



The openlab project seeks to build public-private partnerships between CERN and leading ICT companies with the goal of accelerating the advancement of cutting-edge technologies that will be useful for particle physics-related research around the world. The project will use the MatrixNet machine learning technology from Yandex for various purposes. It is already deployed in a B-meson decay analysis project, and will soon be deployed to analyze other complex physical processes. To help researchers better leverage the analytical powers of MatrixNet, Yandez specialists have developed a new interface that makes the technology easier for scientists to use, aiding them in identifying rare events with high precision.

For its part, CERN is pleased to be working alongside Yandex. “Today’s physics deals with large datasets that need to be properly processed and interpreted. New discoveries are all but impossible without meticulous data analysis. To this respect we are very interested in using and testing the services and technologies Yandex is developing. CERN collaboration with Yandex started few years ago and we are now very pleased to strengthen it with Yandex becoming a CERN openlab associate member,” said Bob Jones, head of CERN openlab, in a statement.

Representatives from Yandex are pleased as well. “We have built a friendly relationship with the European Organization for Nuclear Research, and, by joining CERN now we reinforce and expand our collaboration. Being a CERN openlab associate member opens up new opportunities for contributing to the Organization’s projects and gives us a wide access to the LHC experiment data. These datasets allow us both to improve our technologies and contribute to advances in physics,” added Andrey Ustyuzhanin, head of the CERN openlab sponsorship at Yandex.

This marks a new stage in the ongoing collaboration between CERN and Yandex, which previously created a custom search tool for scientists working on the Large Hadron Collider project.

Want to learn more about the latest in communications and technology? Then be sure to attend ITEXPO Miami 2013, Jan 29- Feb. 1 in Miami, Florida.  Stay in touch with everything happening at ITEXPO (News - Alert). Follow us on Twitter.




Edited by Jamie Epstein
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