“I felt very threatened by machine learning,” says Jesse Thaler, a theoretical particle physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Initially, he says he felt like it jeopardized his human expertise classifying particle jets. But Thaler has since come to embrace it, applying machine learning to a variety of problems across particle physics. “Machine learning is a collaborator,” he says.
Over the past decade, in tandem with the broaderdeep-learning revolution, particle physicists have trained algorithms to solve previously intractable problems and tackle completely new challenges.