CERN’s Schools of Computing (CSC) aim at creating a common technical culture in scientific computing among young scientists and engineers involved in particle physics or in sister experimental disciplines. The CSCs are usually held in August/September, they are open to postgraduate students and medium-experienced research personnel  that works at CERN or at external institutes in particle physics, computing or related fields. Last summer, Sverre Jarp, CERN openlab CTO, and Andrzej Nowak, CERN openlab researcher working in the platform competence centre, participated as lecturers. As usual, several CSC students evidenced a deep knowledge of some of the topics analysed and it came quite naturally that these students with highly-convincing proposals could share their deep know-how with the rest. For that reason, the CSC management created in 2005 an inverted CERN School of Computing scheme, during which the selected students turn into teachers. iCSCs are also part of a whole process for identifying and  training new young  lecturers for the main summer school. This is the other dimension: a school for teaching future teachers. Andrzej Nowak himself, was appointed full lecturer after teaching at iCSC2008.  iCSC 2013, the 6^th inverted school edition, took place the 25th and 26th of February: five former CSC students were selected to give lectures. Two of them were actually former CERN openlab summer students.

Felice Pantaleo was an openlab summer student in 2010 and currently a technical student in PH-SFT group at CERN. He is also a MSc student in High Energy Physics at the University of Pisa. Felice has worked with CERN openlab on parallelization of RooFit and on numerical accuracy of Minuit since 2010. Currently, he is working on the development of a real-time software Level 0 trigger using multicore CPUs, accelerators and high performance networks for the NA62 experiment at CERN. At the iCSC, he held lectures on “Introduction to parallel computing on GPUs” and spoke about the “Use of GPUs for triggering in HEP experiments”

Martin Hellmich was an openlab summer student in 2011 and he is currently a fellow in the Grid Data Management section at CERN. He is involved in EUDAT, a project to design and build a common data infrastructure for researchers in Europe. He studied Computer Science in Magdeburg, Germany and Distributed Scientific Computing in Edinburgh. At the iCSC, he gave the introductory talks about “The human visual system and image pre-processing”, about  the “Image feature detection and 3D reconstruction” as well as about the “Object recognition and scene understanding”.

You can read more about the inverted CERN School of Computing here: iCSC2013 Webpage

Article about the iCSC2013 on CERN's website: Students teach at 'inverted' school of computing