18 July 2024

Photo: Joschka Birk

Joschka Birk grew up in Ravensburg, a city in the south of Germany. He graduated from the University of Freiburg in 2022 with his Master's thesis on the identification of bb-jets with machine learning methods, within the flavor tagging group of the ATLAS experiment. He is currently working at the Institute of Experimental Physics at Universität Hamburg. He contributes to the PCD (Platform for Challenges in Data Science) project, where he – supervised by Gregor Kasieczka – works on machine learning methods for applications in particle physics.

What is the topic of your research?
The focus of my research is foundation models for particle physics. Foundation models are machine learning models that can be used for multiple tasks or datasets. At the moment, most particle physics analyses incorporate several machine learning algorithms, where the individual algorithms are used for particle tagging, particle reconstruction, event classification and many more tasks. Foundation models for particle physics could save an enormous amount of human and compute time and could even outperform task-specific models.

What fascinates you about your research focus?
I am really happy about the enthusiasm for machine learning in the particle physics community. Today, machine learning methods are a crucial part of how particle physicists are trying to find new physics and it is quite exciting to work on new methods that could help this effort. Additionally, the field of machine learning is moving very fast, which makes it quite exciting to work in.

What do you like about the cluster Quantum Universe?
The QU Days and the annual meeting are really nice to get in touch with other PhD students, both for discussing research-related topics and to discuss about general things involved in the PhD.

What do you like to do in your free time?
I In my free time I like to go bouldering, go out with friends and I really enjoy cooking. Recently, I also took the chance to benefit from all the water in Hamburg by adding rowing to the list of sports I do.