My name is Ioannis Kiaras, I am a Computer Scientist specialised in Artificial Intelligence and I received my bachelors degree from the University of Hertfordshire/IST Campus in Athens. My thesis project was to create an Artificial Neural Network that would be able to classify if the next day's closing price of a stock will be raised or lowered, based on the NASDAQ stock market. The topology of the network would be determined by a genetic evolutionary algorithm based on the Darwin theory, the survival of the fittest, which will create a fixed number of neural networks and keep the two with the best results, to create based on them the new generation of improved neural networks. The result of the thesis was successful, having a correct prediction ratio starting from 60% and showing the great improvement that genetic algorithms bring to the Artificial Neural Networks.

Working at CERN was always a dream for me and the summer student program gave me that opportunity. I wasn't familiar with the summer student programme of CERN and I was informed through the social media when I opted for CERN's news feed. As soon as I learned about the summer school I immediately applied. My biggest concern was that CERN would accept only physicists, but it turned out that there are summer students from every field of science. One of the biggest advantages being in the summer school of CERN is the experience you gain working and interacting with people from all around the world, learning their way of thinking, how they work and live, a multicultural society all working towards the same goal.

Getting a work project in my field of interest seemed very hard to me, since my degree is not physics, but eventually the project that I was assigned fits exactly with my background and gives me an opportunity to increase my knowledge. The first part of the project is to learn how the Hough Transform works and then implement it in C++. Since until now I have never used C++, I used to work only with C and JAVA, through the implementation of the Hough Algorithm I learned to use C++ as well, which I believe it might be one of the benefits of the summer school. In the second part of the project I will have to use CUDA for the parallelisation of the software, something I have never done before and I am realy looking forward to it.

Working at CERN, even as a summer student, gave me the unique experience of working in one of the biggest research center in the world. I hope this will lead to more opportunities in other reasearch centers and help me achieve my goals.