The other day I traveled with Kalliopi and our two newborns to Padova from Lulea. After six full months in Lapland - a full autumn and winter, in fact - I needed to get back to my original office, and take care of other business at what has become my s... Continue reading →

Although I have long retired from serious chess tournaments (they take too much time, a luxury I do not have anymore - even more so now that I have two infants to help grow!), I insist playing online blitz on chess.com, with alternating fortunes. My el... Continue reading →

These days I am putting the finishing touches on a hybrid algorithm that optimizes a system (a gamma-ray observatory) by combining reinforcement-learning with gradient descent. Although I published an optimization strategy for that application already,... Continue reading →

Strange how time goes by. And strange I would say that, since I know time does not flow, it is just our perception of one of the spacetime coordinates of our block universe... The thing is, on February 5 I will turn 60. An important date for anybo... Continue reading →

I recently listened again to Richard Feynman explaining why the flowing of time is probably an illusion. In modern physics time is just a coordinate, on the same footing as space, and the universe can be described as a four-dimensional object — a space... Continue reading →

Today I was saddened to hear of the passing of Hans Jensen, a physicist and former colleague in the CDF experiment at Fermilab. There is an obituary page here with nice pics and a bio if you want detail on his interesting, accomplished life. Here I tho... Continue reading →

This year opened in slow motion for me, at least work-wise. I have been on parental leave since December 16, when my third and fourth sons were born within one minute from one another, but of course a workaholic can never stand completely still. In fac... Continue reading →

A fundamental component of my research work is the close collaboration with a large number of scientists from all around the world. This is the result of the very large scale of the experiments that are necessary to investigate the structure of matter ... Continue reading →