• Question: What has been your most complicated project and do you always find an answer to your problems?

    Asked by John Cena to Flavia, Craig, Giuditta on 10 Nov 2015.
    • Photo: Giuditta Perversi

      Giuditta Perversi answered on 10 Nov 2015:

      Probably the one I’m working on right now for my PhD, in which I am supposed to create a system that behaves similarly to an already known one and look for really subtle changes in a big amount of data that can lead me to the discovery.
      Not always, dead-ends are a thing also in science, you just need to clench your teeth and change approach until you find something that works. It can also happen that you need to reach out for someone to help you, working with a research group is really good for this because sharing issues and questions is an everyday business!

    • Photo: Flavia de Almeida Dias

      Flavia de Almeida Dias answered on 11 Nov 2015:

      I have many complicated projects I have been working on for a few years, and they seem all equally complicated to me! Currently I am working on a software that is intended to mimic the behaviour of the particles produced in the LHC collisions when they pass by parts of the ATLAS detector. We have a software that does that as default, but it is really really slow, because it involves a lot of very complicated maths. So I am developing an alternative software, which makes approximations instead of calculating all the tiny details. But I need to choose which approximations to make very carefully, because I want my final result to be very precise too! But the idea here is that my program does the same job, but 200 times faster, and almost as precise. Wish me luck!

      Not always I find answers to my problems, but that is how science works! Some problems even don’t have a solution. But when I don’t find an answer after working on one approach for very long, I just try to sleep on it, forget what I was doing, and approach the problem again with a totally different method. Sometimes it works! Sometimes it doesn’t… But if it was always easy to find the solution for all the problems, it would be no fun!

    • Photo: Craig Bull

      Craig Bull answered on 11 Nov 2015:

      My most complicated project involved organising various different groups to all work towards one common goal. Planning is important in any project. We don’t allways get an answer to our problems but often this can take your work in a completely unexpected and different direction – that is what makes science fun – you don’t know the answer to start with

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