Well, it is now official, so I thought I would let my blog know about it too: I am honored to announce that I was chosen to serve in the CMS Statistics Committee. Along with eight highly distinguished colleagues, I will work for at least the next two years in a group that will take care of ensuring the accuracy of all results that our 2500-strong collaboration will produce.
CMS is one of the two high-energy physics experiments designed to study the proton-proton collisions delivered by the LHC, the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland. The machine is expected to start data-taking in November this year.
The great, possibly ground-breaking physics expected by CMS will require exceptional scrutiny and rigor in the way the data is analyzed and results are presented.
According to the web page of the group, here is our mandate:
The CMS Statistics Committee forms recommendations on
statistical issues identified in CMS physics analyses. Such issues
include, but are not limited to, the fitting of theoretical models to
data distributions, the estimation of the significance of and limits on
various signals, the handling of systematic errors and the combination
of results from different analyses.The committee also communicates with other experiments in order to
recommend common methods -- across experiments -- to be used in the
extraction of conclusions from the data and also in the combination of
CMS results with other external measurements.[...]The members of the committee are expected to act as consultants to CMS
collaborators seeking input on specialized statistics issues. Upon the
request of a physics group or the physics coordinator, the CMS
Statistics Committee also makes formal recommendations [...] regarding the explicit handling of statistics issues on
any physics analysis in CMS.The committee consists of people with broad and extensive knowledge of
statistics issues [...]. The committee makes its recommendations to the physics group
conveners or the physics coordinator, depending on the analysis in
question.
Well, this really makes me proud, and quite a bit worried. I will have to work hard to live up to the expectations of this charge!
