Recommendation letter for Anastasios Antoniadis.

To whom it may concern, It is a pleasure for me to recommend Anastasios Antoniadis to your attention. Anastasios is currently working under my supervision as CERN technical student, on a project that is crucial for the physics analyses of the CERN CMG group (Physics research in CMS). Over the past couple years, our group has developed a common analysis framework, that is used in all of our physics analyses, and that has spread to other institutes collaborating with our group. The aim of this analysis framework is to provide a central production of simulated and data event samples suitable for all kinds of analyses. The production of samples is mostly done using the local CERN computing resources. For all analyses, we typically process several hundred samples from CMS, corresponding to 1.5 billion events. A database is used to keep track of all samples ever produced, and of the version of the software used to produce each of these samples. My previous technical student had been working on setting up this database and the corresponding python utilities to access this database. He had to leave at the end of his contract in July 2012, before being able to correct a few bugs. Anastasios arrived a few months later. I had decided to try and adopt a very loose leadership style with him from the very beginning. I wanted to give him directions, to let him work for a week, and to then see him again to give him feedback. As a first task, I simply showed him the tools, described a bit our use cases and the database structure, and told him: just play around and learn about that. Thats what he did, and I was pleasantly surprised to see that after only one month, he had read the whole code and understood most of it. He was even finding bugs in parts of the code, the purpose of which was unknown to him at that time! Before Christmas, Anastasios had fixed various bugs that had been a pain in our neck for months, and had refactored in a backward-compatible way what had to be made more robust, leaving the good code alone. Anastasios is now working on the main part of his project, which consists in setting up a validation suite for our analysis system. The purpose of this project is to provide a way for the users of the analysis system to define validation jobs creating ROOT files, and text files from our existing samples. Anastasios is then responsible for keeping track of all the information about each root file in the database, and for storing them securely on AFS. This information includes: link to the mother sample, validation analyzer which produced the file, version of the validation code used to produce the file, etc. This work is going to imply a large amount of collaboration with the physicists in our group, who will define the validation jobs. He will then have to provide a python-based web server able to display a comparison between these files, together with a python-based suite of command-line tools, that will be used on the web-server as well. Anastasios is already demonstrating impressive programming skills (in particular in python and SQL which are the only languages I can judge him about), very good communication skills (e.g. by email) a lot of independence, and an absolute dedication to his work. I have therefore no doubt that he would be a great addition to your team. If you wish to learn more about Anastasios, please dont hesitate to contact me directly. Best regards, Colin BERNET CERN Research staff (PH/CMG) Tenure researcher in CNRS / Ecole Polytechnique