Are you passionate about science? Do you like communicating that passion to the general public? Then come along to the 2019 CERN Summer Student Webfest on the weekend of 26 to 28 July. 

The event is a grassroots initiative, open to all summer students, staff and users. It aims to spark new ideas and innovation for the future of web-based education about CERN, the LHC and particle physics, as well as in humanitarian aid, development and health.

The CERN Summer Student Webfest is a weekend of online web-based creativity, modelled on the gatherings (sometimes called hackfests or hackathons) that energise many open-source communities.

Participants in the CERN Summer Student Webfest will work in teams to design applications that encourage the public to learn more about science and, in particular, CERN’s work. Projects can range from designing online games for kids to creating citizen-science projects and developing low-cost mobile-phone-based cosmic ray detectors. Examples of past projects can be found on the Webfest website. Prizes will be awarded to the best projects.

Although primarily targeted at CERN and CERN openlab summer students, the event is open to people of all ages at CERN with a passion for web-based science outreach and education. You do not have to be a software or hardware expert to contribute: many types of skill sets are needed, from writing and designing to physics and engineering.

Kick-off
Project ideas will be presented at a kick-off event on Friday, 26 July, from 4.00 p.m. to 6.00 p.m. Participants will organise themselves into teams to work on the most exciting pitches. The kick-off event will also introduce a range of tools for web development, creating online educational tools and contributing to science online.

Submitting your ideas
Anyone participating can pitch a project; pitches consist of short (less-than-five-minute) presentations. Participants are encouraged to submit their project ideas on the Webfest website in advance, for the best chance of forming a well-defined team.

Where will the participants work?
Teams will work primarily in CERN Restaurant 1. As the location is an open-space environment, there will be plenty of opportunity for interaction. CERN openlab will provide meal tickets for participants.

Presentations and winners
The event will wrap up on Sunday, 28 July at 4.00 p.m., with a judging panel reviewing the results (based on five-minute ‘lightning talk’ presentations by the teams) and awarding prizes.

The event is organised by CERN openlab. Our event partners also include Citizen Cyberscience Centre, crowdAI, Citizen Cyberlab project, the Port, CERN MediaLab, and the Quantum Future initiative.

Recycling champions are all around us, as is evident from the quiz and survey answers submitted during the recent recycling campaign.

• Some 300 of you participated in the quiz and 56 of you answered all five questions correctly. The winners were picked at random and have been contacted.

Here are the answers, along with links to sites where you can find more information:

Question 1– What categories of waste are recycled or repurposed at CERN? At CERN, we recycle or repurpose metals, wood, PET, Nespresso coffee capsules and many other kinds of waste. (For further information: https://smb-dep.web.cern.ch/en/Introduction-Waste)

Question 2– Where should used office furniture be sent for re-use or recycling? The Recuperation and Sales service in Building 133 (on the Meyrin site) recycles office furniture that is in a poor condition and recovers furniture that is in a good condition for re-use. (For further information: https://smb-dep.web.cern.ch/en/Waste/What_goes_where#Bulky_waste)

Question 3– To what percentage of their maximum capacity should the bins be filled before they are emptied? For safety reasons, bins should never be filled to more than 75% of their capacity before being emptied, whatever their size. (For further information: https://smb-dep.web.cern.ch/en/Waste/Skips_Containers_Bins)

Question 4– Are lead batteries sorted in the same way as other batteries? Lead batteries are sorted in Building 133 and other batteries in Building 262. (For further information: https://smb-dep.web.cern.ch/en/Waste/What_goes_where#Batteries)

Question 5– How are PET plastic bottles recycled? PET bottles are recycled to make new ones. Recycling PET bottles is 74% more environmentally friendly than incineration. (For further information: https://smb-dep.web.cern.ch/en/Waste/What_goes_where#PET)

• The survey was completed by 247 people. Few of them (33%) knew about the SMB department’s website dedicated to waste management, where you can find all kinds of information relating to waste sorting at CERN and the experts to contact if you have any questions. Some 78% of the respondents indicated that the campaign had taught them new information about waste management at CERN. The information that was deemed the most useful was that relating to recycled waste (for 34% of the respondents) and battery sorting (for 28% of the respondents). Around 55% of the respondents indicated that they would be interested in the creation of a “zero waste” club. A meeting will be held this autumn to launch the club under the auspices of the Staff Association.

The waste.management@cern.ch campaign team would like to thank all those who participated in the survey. They received numerous suggestions that will greatly help them to improve waste management at CERN. All the proposals will be taken into consideration in order to offer you new solutions in the near future.

In the heart of Beirut, in a five-storey house owned by the Lebanese national telecommunications company, floors are about to be coated to make them anti-static, walls and ceilings will be insulated, and cabling systems installed so wires don’t become entangled. These and other adjustments will be completed by mid-2020, when approximately 3000 processor cores, donated by CERN, will arrive.

The High-Performance Computing for Lebanon (HPC4L) project is part of efforts by Lebanese scientists to boost the nation’s research capabilities. Like many other countries that have been torn by conflict and have seen their highly-skilled graduates leave to seek better opportunities elsewhere, Lebanon is trying to stem its brain drain. Though the new facility will not be the only HPC centre in the country, it is different because it involves both public and private institutions and has the full support of the government. “There are a few small- scale HPC facilities in various universities, but they suffer from being isolated and are therefore quickly outdated and under-used,” says physicist Haitham Zaraket of Lebanese University in Beirut. “This HPC project puts together the main players in the realm of HPC in Lebanon.”

Having joined the CMS experiment at the LHC in 2016, Lebanese physicists want to develop the new facility into a CMS Tier-2 computing centre. High-speed internet will connect it to universities around the world and HPC4L will ensure operation, maintenance, and user-interfacing for smooth and effective running of the facility. “We’ve been working with the government and with private and public partners to prepare not just the infrastructure but also the team,” explains HPC4L project coordinator Martin Gastal of CERN. “CERN/CMS’s expertise and knowledge will help set up the facility and train users, but the team in Lebanon will run it themselves.” The Lebanese facility will also be used for computational biology, oil and gas discovery, financial forecasting, genome analysis and the social sciences.

Nepal is another country striving for greater digital storage and computing power. In 2017 Nepal signed a cooperation agreement with CERN. The following year, thanks to around 2500 cores provided by CERN an HPC facility was established at the government-run IT Park, with experts from Kathmandu University forming the core team. Rajendra Adhikari, project leader of Nepal’s HPC centre (pictured, second from right), also won an award from NVIDIA for the latest graphics card worth USD 3000 and added it to the system. Nepal has never had computing on such a scale before, says Adhikari. “With this facility, we will be able to train our students and conduct research that calls for high-performance computing and data storage, from climate modelling and earthquake simulations to medical imaging and basic research.”

The Nepal facility is planning to store health data from hospitals, which is often deleted because of lack of storage space, and tests are being carried out to process drone images taken to map topography for hydropower feasibility studies. Even in the initial phases of the new centre, says Adhikari, computing tasks that used to take 45 days can now be processed in just 12 hours.

The SESAME light source in Jordan, which itself received 576 cores from CERN in 2017, is also using its experience to assist neighboring regions in setting up and maintaining HPC facilities. “High-performance computing is a strong enabler of research capacity-building in regions challenged by limited financial resources and talent exodus,” says Gastal. “By supporting the set-up of efficient data processing and storage facilities, CERN and affiliated institutes can assist fellow researchers in investing in the scientific potential of their own countries.”

This article was originally published in the CERN Courier.

From 24 to 28 June, more than 400 researchers from around the world convened at the annual meeting of the Future Circular Collider (FCC) study. Academic and research institutes, industrial partners and funding agencies discussed innovations in the fields of superconductivity, high-field magnets, superconducting RF systems and civil engineering studies and sought to clarify issues surrounding the experimental research topics that FCC can address.

This year’s meeting marked the final event of the Horizon 2020 EuroCirCol project. Thanks to the European Union’s support, a wealth of results in high-tech domains were achieved through the collaborative efforts of partners from Europe and from non-European countries such as the USA, Japan, Korea and Russia. Researchers demonstrated impressive progress toward 16-Tesla magnets and in the performance of superconducting wires. In the context of the US DOE magnet-development programme, breakthroughs in both fields, such as a first accelerator-type magnet exceeding 14 T and a 50% increase in the critical current density of Nb₃Sn wire, promise to reduce significantly the costs of exploring the high-energy frontier and could find practical applications outside particle physics.

The four-volume FCC Conceptual Design Report (CDR) was presented, documenting progress since the 2013 kick-off meeting and authored by 1350 people from 150 institutes. “This report is a remarkable achievement by an effective and diverse collaboration” states Frédérick Bordry, CERN’s Director for Accelerators and Technologies. “It underlines the global attractiveness of the FCC and documents the far-reaching benefits that the project can have for Europe and future generations”.

A wide range of talks focused on a future circular lepton collider (FCC-ee) as the first step of the FCC programme, followed by an energy-frontier proton collider (FCC-hh). Results testify to the technological readiness of the FCC-ee which, combined with progress in the design of beam optics and interaction regions, confirm the feasibility of this machine that could be operational by the end of the 2030s.This schedule would also give time to push the limits of the novel technologies required for an energy-frontier 100 TeV collider.

Precision studies of the Higgs boson, along with a number of other electroweak observables set a clear experimental challenge for the FCC. In his keynote talk, Nima Arkani-Hamed from Princeton’s Institute of Advanced Studies highlighted the importance of scrutinising the Higgs boson for the experimental programme of a post-LHC machine. Speakers also stressed the complementarity between the different collider options in searching for dark-matter candidate particles and new physics. Finally, the potential for studying the strong interaction through heavy-ion collisions and detailing the parton distribution with a proton-electron interaction point were demonstrated.

The sustainability of research infrastructures and the assessment of their societal impact were the two key themes of the “Economics of Science” workshop held during the FCC week. Experts from the field of economics shared lessons learned with representatives from CERN and other research organisations, including SKA, ESA and ESS.

The diverse mix of participants at the FCC week, the positive reception from international researchers and industry and the increasing networking opportunities for young researchers provide a solid foundation and an ideal starting point for further successful joint activities in the coming years.

The Hardronic musical festival is the opportunity for CERN’s staff, summer students, users, and their friends and families, to come to the site and enjoy live music, animations, food and cool drinks.

This year’s edition takes place on Saturday 20 July and has a top-quality programme that caters for many musical tastes. What’s more, the bar is completely run for charity, supporting small but vital projects in Laos, Vietnam, and in Kolkata, India.

There will be food trucks providing some mouth-watering meals, activities for children and, for the first time in the festival’s thirty-year history, the ATLAS collaboration will have a stand offering a chance to the festival-goers to explore the ATLAS experiment in virtual reality.

Don’t miss this fantastic event, where science and music collide.

When: Saturday 20 July, from 3.00 pm
Where: terrace of restaurant 3 on the Prévessin site

For more information, check the festival’s website: http://cern.ch/Hardronic/.

The Prévessin post office, located in building 866, will be temporarily closed from Friday, 12 July, to Monday, 19 August, because of refurbishment work.

The post office will reopen on 20 August.

Thank you for your understanding.

Please note that, contrary to what was announced earlier, the cafeteria located in building 774 will be closed from 22 July to 16 August. It will reopen at the usual hours on Monday, 19 August.

Thank you for your understanding.

After 39 years at CERN, including 37 working with theorists, most recently as DAO of the Theoretical Physics department, Jeanne Rostant is retiring this summer. In the 1990s, she assisted the late Sergio Fubini develop his Middle-East Scientific Collaboration, which helped prepare the way for the SESAME laboratory that has been established in Jordan with support from Iran, Israel, the Palestinian Authority and other countries in the region.

In lieu of any personal gifts to her, Jeanne asked the CERN & Society Foundation to collect money to help cover the costs of participation by a Palestinian student in the CERN Summer Student Programme for those from Non-Member States. Following a fantastic response from donors, the student has now arrived at CERN, where he is attending lectures and working with the ATLAS collaboration.

“Out of all my CERN memories, working with Sergio on his Middle-East project was one of the most enriching, and I wanted to acknowledge this,” says Rostant.

This particular donation campaign has now closed, but the CERN & Society Foundation supports many other good causes to which you can donate. If you also would like to organise a fundraiser in support of one of the many CERN & Society projects, please contact the CERN Partnerships & Fundraising team.

Each year the Pension Fund Benefits Service sends an individual breakdown of pension rights to all staff members and fellows.

Please note that your individual breakdown will be sent the week commencing 15 July 2019.

Further information about the CERN Pension Fund and your pension benefits can be found on the Fund’s website: https://pensionfund.cern.ch.

Benefits Service
CERN Pension Fund

Geneva and Ghent. At the 2019 European Physical Society’s High-Energy Physics conference (EPS-HEP) taking place in Ghent, Belgium, the ATLAS and CMS collaborations presented a suite of new results. These include several analyses using the full dataset from the second run of CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC), recorded at a collision energy of 13 TeV between 2015 and 2018. Among the highlights are the latest precision measurements involving the Higgs boson. In only seven years since its discovery, scientists have carefully studied several of the properties of this unique particle, which is increasingly becoming a powerful tool in the search for new physics.

The results include new searches for transformations (or “decays”) of the Higgs boson into pairs of muons and into pairs of charm quarks. Both ATLAS and CMS also measured previously unexplored properties of decays of the Higgs boson that involve electroweak bosons (the W, the Z and the photon) and compared these with the predictions of the Standard Model (SM) of particle physics. ATLAS and CMS will continue these studies over the course of the LHC’s Run 3 (2021 to 2023) and in the era of the High-Luminosity LHC (from 2026 onwards).

The Higgs boson is the quantum manifestation of the all-pervading Higgs field, which gives mass to elementary particles it interacts with, via the Brout-Englert-Higgs mechanism. Scientists look for such interactions between the Higgs boson and elementary particles, either by studying specific decays of the Higgs boson or by searching for instances where the Higgs boson is produced along with other particles. The Higgs boson decays almost instantly after being produced in the LHC and it is by looking through its decay products that scientists can probe its behaviour.

In the LHC’s Run 1 (2010 to 2012), decays of the Higgs boson involving pairs of electroweak bosons were observed. Now, the complete Run 2 dataset – around 140 inverse femtobarns each, the equivalent of over 10 000 trillion collisions – provides a much larger sample of Higgs bosons to study, allowing measurements of the particle’s properties to be made with unprecedented precision. ATLAS and CMS have measured the so-called “differential cross-sections” of the bosonic decay processes, which look at not just the production rate of Higgs bosons but also the distribution and orientation of the decay products relative to the colliding proton beams. These measurements provide insight into the underlying mechanism that produces the Higgs bosons. Both collaborations determined that the observed rates and distributions are compatible with those predicted by the Standard Model, at the current rate of statistical uncertainty.

Since the strength of the Higgs boson’s interaction is proportional to the mass of elementary particles, it interacts most strongly with the heaviest generation of fermions, the third. Previously, ATLAS and CMS had each observed these interactions. However, interactions with the lighter second-generation fermions – muons, charm quarks and strange quarks – are considerably rarer. At EPS-HEP, both collaborations reported on their searches for the elusive second-generation interactions.

ATLAS presented their first result from searches for Higgs bosons decaying to pairs of muons (H→μμ) with the full Run 2 dataset. This search is complicated by the large background of more typical SM processes that produce pairs of muons. “This result shows that we are now close to the sensitivity required to test the Standard Model’s predictions for this very rare decay of the Higgs boson,” says Karl Jakobs, the ATLAS spokesperson. “However, a definitive statement on the second generation will require the larger datasets that will be provided by the LHC in Run 3 and by the High-Luminosity LHC.”

CMS presented their first result on searches for decays of Higgs bosons to pairs of charm quarks (H→cc). When a Higgs boson decays into quarks, these elementary particles immediately produce jets of particles. “Identifying jets formed by charm quarks and isolating them from other types of jets is a huge challenge,” says Roberto Carlin, spokesperson for CMS. “We’re very happy to have shown that we can tackle this difficult decay channel. We have developed novel machine-learning techniques to help with this task.”

The Higgs boson also acts as a mediator of physics processes in which electroweak bosons scatter or bounce off each other. Studies of these processes with very high statistics serve as powerful tests of the Standard Model. ATLAS presented the first-ever measurement of the scattering of two Z bosons. Observing this scattering completes the picture for the W and Z bosons as ATLAS has previously observed the WZ scattering process and both collaborations the WW process. CMS presented the first observation of electroweak-boson scattering that results in the production of a Z boson and a photon.

“The experiments are making big strides in the monumental task of understanding the Higgs boson,” says Eckhard Elsen, CERN’s Director of Research and Computing. “After observation of its coupling to the third-generation fermions, the experiments have now shown that they have the tools at hand to address the even more challenging second generation. The LHC’s precision physics programme is in full swing.”

• ATLAS:
  • Summary of 2019 EPS-HEP results: https://atlas.cern/updates/atlas-news/new-results-eps-2019
  • Physics briefings on 2019 EPS-HEP results: https://atlas.cern/tags/eps-2019
  • Physics publications: https://twiki.cern.ch/twiki/bin/view/AtlasPublic/Publications
• CMS:
  • Summary of 2019 EPS-HEP results: https://cms.cern/news/EPS-HEP2019
  • Physics briefings on 2019 EPS-HEP results: https://cms.cern/tags/cms-physics-briefings-eps-hep-2019
  • Physics publications: http://cern.ch/cms-results/public-results/publications/

The Knowledge Transfer group at CERN has initiated a pilot programme in collaboration with the Israel Innovation Authority (IIA). The purpose of the programme is to explore how cutting-edge Israeli companies and institutes can embrace specific CERN technology and know-how to fuel their innovation and help drive positive impacts for society. 

CERN set up a successful two-day event in June last year to meet with industrial directors from Israel and discuss possible proposals. As a result, four exciting projects have been selected by CERN and IIA within a wide range of application fields: CEVA, All-In-Image, ImmunoBrain Checkpoint and HIL Applied Medical. The four companies were awarded funds from the IIA to start a close collaboration with CERN. 

The collaboration is a pilot and has shown that the Israeli ecosystem has very “fertile ground” for growing meaningful use cases out of CERN technology. The companies will have access to some of CERN’s unique technological know-how and expertise. Scientific advances in accelerators, detectors and computing have historically led to positive impacts on medical and biomedical technologies. Three of the four selected projects relate to medical applications, and will benefit from CERN’s long-standing contribution to the medical field.

The collaboration has brought out the best in both CERN and IIA. “There is a lot of innovation potential in CERN technologies, and market insights and an entrepreneurial spirit are required to realise it. Thanks to the IIA, we have found the best partners for this in Israel,” says Han Dols, leader of the Business Development section at CERN. Today, experts from different departments at CERN are working closely with the Israeli companies in order to bring these ambitions to fruition. Their involvement and collaboration are vital contributions to the success of the programme. 

The cooperation with CERN has started a new age of direct industrial research benefits for the Israeli research and development community. Dr. Aviv Zeevi Balasiano, Vice President of the Technology Infrastructure Division (Israel Innovation Authority)

About the companies collaborating with CERN:

CEVA concentrates on the development of innovative neural networks for data compression with know-how from CERN on extremely fast machine-learning hardware. CEVA’s technology is used in many consumer applications like mobile phones and intelligent equipment for the home.

All-In-Image focuses on machine learning techniques for data analysis in the medical field, provided via a ‘software as a service’ model across the globe. This project will help hospitals and clinics search for data in order to obtain new insights into illnesses and their treatment options. 

ImmunoBrain Checkpoint has established a consortium with Tel-Aviv University for the use of the technology BioDynaMo, a CERN openlab collaboration for simulation of large quantities of cells. Such simulations might help to better predict the effectiveness of immunotherapy applications for the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease. 

HIL Applied Medical focuses on the use of CERN expertise in the field of magnets and detectors for the development of ultra-compact, high-performance systems for proton therapy. Proton therapy is among the most advanced, focused and precise forms of radiotherapy. 

On 14 and 15 September, more than 150 activities will be offered to the 80 000 visitors expected on our sites. Volunteers will be the key to the success of this exceptional event. More than 1700 volunteers have already signed-up but we still need another 1000 to fill the many roles that remain open.

Whether you are a member of CERN personnel or contractor’s personnel, everyone will have a role to play! The role assignments have now started so please sign-up before 31 July. Instructions and other practical information can be found on cern.ch/od2019/volunteers. 

Following one week of general training in Nairobi, Kenya, the second part of the CERN-UNESCO School on Digital Libraries took place at CERN this year, from 17 to 28 June. This in-depth training saw the participation of four African librarians invited to CERN to complete their training after attending the Kenyan School in early October 2018.

Now on its fifth edition, the CERN-UNESCO School on Digital Libraries aims at making African research more visible, by familiarising librarians with open-access and open-science principles, introducing them to new web technologies and services, such as Invenio, and advising them how to further develop their own digital libraries.

Throughout their two weeks in Geneva, the participants attended conferences at the United Nations, met advocates of open access and created new professional networks.  “It was my first time in Europe, and we had the opportunity to meet new people, make connections with founders and delegates around the world”, says Peter Otuoma, from Kenya, who is a systems librarian at Karatina University.

Most importantly, during this follow-up training, they had the chance to work hands-on on open-access technologies with CERN experts, which helped them come up with solutions for their own professional challenges.  “The solutions for open access I discovered here were quite helpful. Now I feel confident I will be able to test my knowledge back in my home institution”, says Timothy Sukya, systems librarian at the University of Nairobi.

When asked about what the future had in store, Daniel Mwashivya, from Tanzania, had no doubts he would help spread and share the knowledge learned at CERN: “The role of librarians worldwide is constantly changing. We are no longer just sitting on shelves and this is why we need to familiarise ourselves with digital libraries.”

Winfreda Nalwimba, from Zambia, the only female participant who was able to attend the training at CERN, hopes that by sharing her experience at CERN, she can inspire more girls in her home institution to be involved in science.

The CERN-UNESCO School for Digital Libraries is an Education & Outreach project supported by the CERN & Society Foundation. The 2016 school in Ghana, the 2018 school in Kenya and their follow-up training at CERN were possible due to the kind donation received from Ms. Margarita Louis-Dreyfus.

Download the 2018 CERN & Society Foundation Annual Review, to learn more about the Nairobi CERN-UNESCO School on Digital Libraries.

Geneva and Barcelona. Dutch artist Rosa Menkman has been selected as the winner of the first Collide International award in Barcelona alongside four Honorary Mentions. The residency award, organised by Arts at CERN in partnership with the City of Barcelona and the Institute of Culture of Barcelona, received 228 entries from 49 countries.

“The primary objective of Arts at CERN is to create extraordinary opportunities for dialogue and exchange between artists and scientists, and to encourage significant connections between creative minds in a fundamental research environment. I am particularly proud to announce the winners of the first Collide International prize in collaboration with the city of Barcelona,” says Monica Bello, head of Arts at CERN.

“Here at CERN, we value diversity and exchange, across communities and countries. It is an inherent part of our laboratory’s culture and essential to the success of our research. We appreciate the strong partnerships that now allow us to welcome new artists to connect with our community. I am excited to see what they will achieve together with our scientists,” says Charlotte Lindberg Warakaulle, CERN’s Director for International Relations.

According to the jury, comprised of Monica Bello, Arts at CERN, Oriol Gual, director of La Capella in Barcelona, Joana Hurtado, director of Fabra i Coats and Helga Timko, CERN physicist, the winning artist demonstrated a sophistication of concept and approach. Menkman’s topic focused on the idea of resolution, which resonates with CERN’s quest to perform research from the smallest to the largest scale. They found Menkman’s argument about the significance and purpose of scientific measurement and how information is filtered in and out of an experiment inspiring. The artist will be invited to CERN in Geneva for two months to explore these topics, after which she will work for a month on a 3D video production at Fabra i Coats.

“Barcelona City Council has the will to make the city a European capital in research and innovation through its Barcelona Science Plan. We have initiated several measures, which makes me particularly enthusiastic about the collaboration established with CERN, an alliance that will allow us to bring art and science to the citizens. I would like to congratulate all those who participated in this first edition in our city, especially Rosa Menkman, whom we will receive during her stay in Barcelona at Fabra i Coats – Art Factory and Barcelona’s Centre for Contemporary Art,” says Joan Subirats, Barcelona's Deputy Mayor of Culture, Education and Science.

The Honorary Mentions are: Samoa Rémy from Switzerland, Addie Wagenknecht from Austria, Nathan Witt from the UK, and Barcelona-based artist Gabriella Torres from Puerto Rico. Their work presented abstract phenomena in tangible forms while demonstrating their ability to question and analyse the deeper meaning of physical observations.

Collide International is Arts at CERN’s flagship programme and residency award, organised every three years in partnership with a city and a cultural organisation. The collaboration with Barcelona began with this first award and will continue until 2021.   

Further information:

Arts at CERN website

Arts at CERN Facebook site

Twitter ArtsAtCern

The 2018 CERN Annual Report is available.
It was presented to the CERN Council in June and highlights CERN's main achievements and activities from 2018.
You can read it online here.
Paper copies are available at the Library.

Happy reading!

We have reported on sophisticated attacks via smartphones in the past (see “Your iPhone as akeylogger”). Here are two new twists – probably still theoretical, but both pointing towards new ways to spy on you by misusing your microphone…

The attack vector in both cases is the same: a local microphone to which the attacker has access. The passive attack is aimed at your desktop computer and just uses your smartphone’s microphone (or any other connected microphone to which an attacker has access). Using a Skype call, Google Hangouts, or any other streaming audio chat (even via a Google Home or Amazon Echo device), the attacker listens to the sound of your screen’s power supply. The way the screen renders the display, “sending signals to each pixel of each line with varying intensity levels for each sub-pixel” creates fluctuations in the power consumption, and hence in the “hum” of the power supply. Intercepted by the microphone, sophisticated machine learning techniques are subsequently employed to deduce from the hum what is being displayed on the screen… The first results show that researchers managed to determine which website out of the Alexa top-10 websites was displayed on the test screen with a 97% accuracy. On-screen keyboard strokes could be identified with an accuracy of 96% and 40% depending on the test set-up. Extended to full words, this can exceed 99% and 70% accuracy. And their results to capture paragraphs with more than 100 words displayed on screen look disturbingly accurate too.

The active attack is aimed at smartphones and uses both the local microphone and the local loudspeaker. Paired together, using the loudspeaker to emit acoustic signals inaudible to humans and recording them again with the microphone, they create a small basic sonar system: “The echo signal can be used to profile user interaction with the device”, i.e. the way your finger swipes over and interacts with the screen. Interestingly, they’ve shown how this sonar can be employed to help identify the swipe pattern used to unlock an Android phone – reducing the number of trials to be performed by attacker by 70%. And that is only their proof-of-concept…

Admittedly, both attacks are still rudimentary and theoretical, but with more computing power at hand, better machine learning algorithms and more research, both also show what the sophisticated attackers, snoops and spies of this world might add to their exploitation arsenal in the future… By the way, if you are using an Android smartphone and swipe through the 9x9 pattern to unlock it, check out this paper listing the 20 most used swipe patterns. Using one of these is like using one of the top-10 most used passwords. If yours is listed, maybe it’s time to move to another, more secure pattern?

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Do you want to learn more about computer security incidents and issues at CERN? Follow our Monthly Report. For further information, questions or help, check our website or contact us at Computer.Security@cern.ch.

On Tuesday 13 August and Thursday 15 August, the CERN openlab summer students 2019 will present their work at a dedicated public Lighting Talk sessions (Session 1, Session 2).

In a 5-minute presentation, each CERN openlab summer student will introduce the audience to their project, explain the technical challenges they have faced and describe the results of what they have been working on for the past few weeks.

It will be a great opportunity for the students to showcase the progress they have made so far and for the audience of people from the IT and other CERN departments to be informed about various information-technology projects, the solutions that the students have come up with and the potential future challenges they have identified.

This year, the CERN openlab summer student programme hosts 40 students from 19 different nationalities for 9 weeks. Undergraduate and graduate students in computer science and physics have come from all over the world for a summer internship at CERN working on specialized advanced computing projects with applications in High Energy Physics.

As part of the CERN openlab summer-student programme the students have been also invited to attend a series of lectures given by IT experts on advanced CERN-related topics and had the opportunity to visit the CERN facilities and experiments as well as other research laboratories and companies such as IBM, ETH, and OpenSystems.

CERN openlab is a unique public-private partnership between CERN and leading ICT companies that has been created more than 15 years ago to tackle the LHC computing, data and infrastructure challenges. Its mission is to accelerate the development of cutting-edge solutions to be used by the worldwide LHC community.

Nicole L’Huillier and Alan Bogana have just spent three weeks at CERN in the framework of Simetría, an artist residency split between CERN and the astronomical observatories in Chile. At the start of July, the two artists each presented their first creation inspired by their stay in the world of physics.

Nicole L’Huillier has brought forgotten sounds back to life: the Chilean artist has devised a sound sculpture that amplifies and broadcasts the sounds that surround us but that we do not hear. Housing six colourful speakers, her sculpture was designed to be a “parasite” in the environment where it is installed. 

In early July, the artist placed her installation in the ALICE experiment, and then on the lawn outside Restaurant 1. Her intention is to “connect observers with their quark-gluon plasma origins, shake up their material existence and let this parasitic medium guide them through a concert of a specific moment in space and time.”

Alan Bogana also exhibited his work in Restaurant 1, on 11 July: colourful holograms that caught the eye of many visitors one evening.

This Genevan artist is particularly interested in the behaviour of light and its interactions with matter. He produces art in many different media and is also interested in research into dark matter, computer-produced visual simulations and technological architecture.

As the first winners of Simetría, Nicole L’Huillier and Alan Bogana will now visit the observatories in Chile to continue their artistic quest through the scientific universe.