Yandex teams up with CERN

Russia's largest Internet company, Yandex, has entered into an agreement with the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN) and become an associate member of CERN openlab — a public-private partnership between the center and leading IT companies.

"The machine-learning methods we use for everyday tasks in your smartphone or desktop have more serious applications. The same algorithms can be used, for example, to search for the Higgs boson," said Yandex CEO Arkady Volozh at the DLD Conference, which was held in Munich on Jan. 20-22.

Under the project, CERN scientists will be able to use the computing resources and data processing technology of Yandex, including MatrixNet. In return, the Russian company can take part in the center's research activities and gain access to experimental data, which will help refine its technologies.

In particular, CERN has already begun to make use of MatrixNet to analyze the decay of mesons (unstable elementary particles), and the research center plans to expand the scope in future. At present, CERN's use of MatrixNet is supervised by a team of Yandex specialists, but plans exist to develop a service that will allow CERN to use the technology on its own.

Yandex started to collaborate with CERN in 2011, allowing the center to access its computing power. In April 2012, the company developed a special search tool to accelerate the retrieval of relevant information about experiments at the Large Hadron Collider. Other partners in CERN openlab include the IT giant Intel.

First published in Russian in RIA Novosti.

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