The 28th Conference on Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics (CHEP 2026) was held May 25 – 29, 2026 at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, Thailand. The CHEP conference series has historically addressed computing, networking, and software challenges for the experiments which today produce hundreds of petabytes of data. This year, the focus has expanded to reflect modern problems and technologies, including but not limited to AI/ML in operations. This made the conference a perfect opportunity to present the Archi project (https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.04755) to the broader community, and to collaborate with others working on similar ideas.
The session where Archi was presented (slides) was one of the better attended ones, reflecting the interest on behalf of the community in these tools and the issues they aim to solve. Feedback was quite positive; colleagues appreciated our approach with respect to similar efforts due to our focus on data privacy, and evaluation of our system based on proper benchmarks, both automatically and, crucially, with human experts.
There are efforts from various collaborations to develop similar systems, which confirms the universality of the exact problem that Archi aims to solve: poor, scattered data and documentation in large scientific collaborations, and the need for a low-barrier-to-entry, private way to consolidate, retrieve, and act on this information. Archi was the most mature of the approaches showcased at the conference, which motivates us to extend our efforts beyond CMS and garner as many contributions from the community as possible to help maintain and develop the framework. There is always lots of work to do to answer new challenges and ensure we are making maximum use of these ever-evolving technologies.
Moving forward, we aim to have a couple more papers out in the coming months evaluating the system with its many improvements since the presentation at CHEP. Hopefully, these will be followed by a proposed workshop at CERN in the fall, where we’ll push on even further!
Bonus: Below, two of the core Archi members pre-, mid-, and post-monsoon during an exploration of the jungles of northern Thailand after the conference…
