In January 2020 I was a clueless and optimistic freshman exploring a future in physics, and so I decided to sign on for a research project studying machine learning techniques for b-tagging. Despite not understanding any part of the research description at the time, I was eager to get started and agreed to join the project, not knowing at the time that was going to be the best decision I made in my time at MIT.
Three years later that same b-tagging project has been the primary focus of my research efforts here, and has led me to an internship at CERN and conferences in Fermilab, New York, and Bologna as well as setting me on the path to my future PhD. This thesis serves as a mostly comprehensive summary of the work I've done over the time and while I'm happy with the results we've obtained, I'm personally very happy to have this publication to conclude my current term with MIT and the CMS experiment, though I look forward to plenty of chances to continue to collaborate or return in the future.
The abstract page of my thesis is found below, with the full thesis being available to download here.
