I’ve been spending way too much time with PowerPoint lately. I desperately need some hacking time. Luckily, Kaggle is running a challenge that combines two of my favorite interests - machine learning and particle physics.

Like many, I’ve watched CERN’s Large Hadron Collider project with strong interest. I don’t pretend to fully understand quantum physics, but I do find the mysteries at that level of reality fascinating and eagerly watch TV shows, documentaries, and YouTube videos on the subject.

Needless to say, I was really excited to find out about Kaggle’s Higgs Boson Machine Learning Challenge. CERN and the Atlas Project have provided a simulated data set of collider events. The goal is to develop a machine learning algorithm capable of identifying Higgs Boson decays. The winner may get the chance to analyze real collider data and visit CERN. That would be very, very cool.

So, I plan to spend some of Father’s Day digging through data trying to solve the mysterious of the Universe. Not a bad way to recuperate from PowerPoint-malaise.