Lecturer Biographies 2013

 
François Flückiger CERN
  François Flückiger is an Internet veteran and was selected for induction in 2013 in the Internet Hall of Fame together with 31 other inductees. Director of the CERN School of Computing, he is Knowledge and Technology Transfer Officer for Information Technologies at CERN .
Before joining CERN in 1978, he was employed for five years by SESA in Paris. At CERN, he has been in charge of external networking for more than 12 years and held positions in infrastructure and application networking, including the management of CERN's World-Wide Web team after the departure of the Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee. He is an adviser to the European Commission, a member of the Internet Society Advisory Council and the author of the reference textbook "Understanding Networked Multimedia" as well as more than 80 articles. He has 40 years of experience in networking and information technologies. François Flückiger graduated from the Ecole Supérieure d'Electricité in 1973 and holds an MBA from the Enterprise Administration Institute in Paris in 1977.

 
Benedikt Hegner CERN
  Benedikt Hegner studied physics, history and philosophy at the RWTH Aachen University and obtained his physics degree working on the integration of the silicon tracker of the CMS experiment at CERN. For his PhD he joined DESY in Hamburg and carried out an analysis on the spin of the top-quark. In parallel, he implemented core parts of the CMS analysis framework. He then joined CERN and took over the coordination of the CMS analysis software. He has been involved in CERN's software development activities since then. Currently, he is responsible for the Software Process & Infrastructure project and the LCG software releases. In addition, he is lead developer for a new common experiment framework, that allows to exploit the parallelism of modern CPU and GPU architectures.

 
Bob Jacobsen

University of California at Berkeley  - USA

Bob Jacobsen is an experimental high-energy physicist and a faculty member at the University of California, Berkeley.  He's a member of the BaBar collaboration, where he lead the effort to create the reconstruction software and the offline system.  He has previously been a member of the ALEPH (LEP) and MarkII (SLC) collaborations. His original academic training was in computer engineering, and he worked in the computing industry before becoming a physicist.


 
Sebastian Lopienski

CERN

Sebastian Lopienski is CERN’s deputy Computer Security Officer. He works on security strategy and policies; offers internal consultancy and audit services; develops and maintains security tools for vulnerability assessment and intrusion detection; provides training and awareness raising; and does incident investigation and response. During his work at CERN since 2001, Sebastian has had various assignments, including designing and developing software to manage and support services hosted in the CERN Computer Centre; providing Central CVS Service for software projects at CERN; and development of applications for accelerator controls in Java. He graduated from the University of Warsaw (MSc in Computer Science) in 2002, and earned an MBA degree at the Enterprise Administration Institute in Aix-en-Provence in 2010. His professional interests include software and network security, distributed systems, and Web and mobile technologies.

 

Andrzej Nowak

CERN

Andrzej Nowak is a member of the CERN openlab CTO office, leading the openlab collaboration with Intel in the Platform Competence Center (PCC). While the PCC focuses mainly on efficient computing solutions for the Large Hadron Collider, the openlab is a broader research partnership between CERN and HP, Huawei, Intel, Oracle and Siemens, with the aim of evaluating and advancing cutting edge IT in a demanding environment. Andrzej has been with openlab since January 2007, when he joined as a Marie Curie Fellow sponsored by the European Commission. Since then, his research concerned high throughput computing, modern parallelism challenges, and recently problems from the Big Data domain. Andrzej also pioneered the educational activities of the openlab: he co-founded multiple teaching series that, over the course of six years, have trained over a thousand scientists and engineers in dozens of workshops, tutorials and international computing schools.

 
Alberto Pace

CERN

Alberto Pace is a member of the IT department at CERN where he leads the Data Management group ensuring a coherent development process for Physics Data management activities, strongly driven by operational and user needs. He has more than 20 years experience in computing services, infrastructure, software engineering, accelerator control and accelerator operation. He graduated in Electronic Engineering from Politecnico di Milano (Italy) in 1987.


 
Danilo Piparo

CERN

Danilo Piparo studied at the University of Milano Bicocca and obtained his degree in Particle Physics at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany, studying the physics of hadronic jets and statistical methods for the Higgs discovery as member of the CMS collaboration. He the joined CERN working for the same experiment, coordinating its Physics validation group to then join the CERN Software Development for the Experiments (SFT) group. As an expert of parallel software development and performance tuning, always focussed on improving the efficiency of data processing in scientific computing. His main activities are concentrated on the parallelisation of the CERN software suite in order to make it suited for the many cores era.

 
Ivica Puljak

University of Split  - Croatia

Ivica Puljak is Professor of physics at University of Split, Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Enginnering and Naval Arhitecture (FESB). He completed his BsC studies in electrical engineering at FESB and MsC studies in particle physics at University of Zagreb. He has been working for his PhD thesis at Laboratory Leprince Ringuet (LLR) at Ecole Polytechnique, Palaiseau, and got his PhD in particle physics from University Paris VI in 2000. In 2011/2012 he was research associate at CERN. He is a member of CMS collaboration since 1994 and MAGIC collaboration since 2009. His research interests are construction of the electromagnetic calorimeter of the CMS detector, search for the Higgs boson and astroparticle physics. 

 

Benjamin Radburn-Smith

Purdue University, U.S.A.

Benjamin Radburn-Smith has recently joined Purdue University as a Postdoctoral Research Associate. Benjamin studied for his PhD in the U.K. jointly with the University of Manchester’s Particle Physics Group and the STFC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory’s Particle Physics Department, where he was based. He joined the RAL CMS group and has been a member of the experiment since 2009. For his research, Benjamin studied multivariate visualisation techniques which can be used in conjunction with a physics analysis. The visualisations of greatest interest include parallel coordinates and the grand tour. He is interested in physics beyond the Standard Model and works within the CMS Exotica group. He recently investigated collimated groups of leptons called Lepton Jets, which are possible signatures of new physics.


 

Are Strandlie

Gjĝvik University College - Norway

Dr. Are Strandlie received his Master of Science degree in Theoretical Physics in 1995 and his Doctor of Science degree in Experimental Particle Physics in 2000, both from the University of Oslo. He was a Research Fellow at CERN between 2001 and 2003, where he was working on track reconstruction software development for the CMS Tracker. Strandlie held a position as Associate Professor of Physics at Gjĝvik University College between 2003 and 2006, and is currently Professor of Physics at the same institution. He also holds a position as Adjunct Professor at the Department of Physics, University of Oslo. He is now involved in the ATLAS experiment at CERN.  Strandlie's research interests are concentrated around various aspects of the analysis of high-energy physics data, including the development and application of adaptive methods for track reconstruction and probabilistic approaches to particle mass determination.

 
 
Assistant to Lecturer Biographie 2013
 
Giuseppe Lo Presti

 CERN

Giuseppe Lo Presti studied Computer Science Engineering in Palermo. He joined CERN in 2004 to complete his PhD studies with a Thesis on Peer-to-peer technologies for Data Acquisition systems in the CMS Experiment. As a post-doc INFN fellow he then joined the CERN IT Department, where he has been one of the major contributors in the software design and development of the CERN Advanced Storage manager (CASTOR), a Hierarchical Storage Manager used at CERN for all physics data (tens of Petabytes). He currently holds a staff position in the Data and Storage Services group, where he is responsible for the database backend and the Grid Storage Resource Manager (SRM) interface of the CASTOR system.

 

 
Andreas J. Peters

CERN

Andreas Peters is member of the CERN data management group. Since 1997 he worked as a student for the NA48 Collaboration at CERN in the development of the data acquisition system and a zero suppression system for the electro-magnetic calorimeter. He finished his PHD in physics at the University of Mainz in 2002 studying direct CP-violation in the neutral kaon system. 2002 he joined as a research fellow the ALICE experiment doing mainly development of GRID software and data management tools. From 2004 on he stayed at CERN working for the European grid project EGEE focused on development of end-user tools for distributed analysis and distributed data management. In 2008 he joined the CERN data management group doing research and development for future data management at CERN.