This year's US ATLAS Hadronic Final State Forum (HFSF2017) takes place at Southern Methodist University. The workshop is open to all (US) ATLAS collaborators. The workshop organization follows previous meetings of this series. More program details will be announced as they become available.

Lennart Adam, a graduate student visiting from Mainz, attended the CTEQ Summer School earlier this summer, and he will tell us some of the things he learned there that are potentially useful for anyone doing an ATLAS analysis. Please see abstract below:

This talk will summarize a selection of topics covered by this year's CTEQ Summer School held in Pittsburgh, PA. The main focus will be on Parton Distribution Functions (PDFs), i.e. a brief introduction to the general properties of PDFs and how to retrieve these from different measurements. As an experimentalist, I will aim to present recent developments of PDF creation from the point of view of an ATLAS analyzer. The second topic of this talk will be a short comparison of the main MC generators (Pythia, Sherpa and Herwig), also seen from the experimentalist's perspective. 

It is anticipated that there will be no ATLAS internal material presented. 

This Machine Learning and b-tagging workshop targets improvements in b-jet identification, including its basic impact parameter and vertex reconstruction algorithms, which can be gained from ML tools such as deep learning, sequence learning and domain adaptation techniques. Within ATLAS, modern ML techniques have begun to be studied for b-tagging but have yet to be fully understood and exploited. 

The workshop will introduce modern ML and b-jet identification algorithms to participants through talks and tutorials, while most of the workshop time will be dedicated to working on projects proposed by participants or meeting organizers. The may include the use of Recurrent Neural Networks and sequence learning algorithms for impact-parameter or secondary/tertiary vertexing algorithms, integration of new ML techniques into high-level b-taggin algorithms like MV2 and DL1, mitigating systematics of the high-level tagger at training time, or the development of new double b-tagging algorithms. 

The 2016 US ATLAS Hadronic Final State Forum (HFSF2016) takes place at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. The workshop is open to all (US) ATLAS collaborators. The workshop organization follows previous meetings of this series. More program details will be announced as they become available.