Website: https://github.com/jpivarski
Email: pivarski@princeton.edu
GitHub: https://github.com/jpivarski

Biography

Jim Pivarski has been an experimental physicist, a Big Data consultant in industry, a software developer for data analysis tools, and a software project manager.

He received a Ph.D. in Experimental Particle Physics from Cornell University, where he analyzed data from the CLEO experiment, followed by the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN.

Starting in 2011, Jim was a consultant at Open Data Group (now ModelOp). There, he analyzed a wide variety of datasets using industry-standard tools and created Portable Format for Analytics (PFA), an open standard for exchanging data mining models, now maintained by the Data Mining Group.

Since 2016, he has been developing the particle physics data analysis ecosystem as a Scientist at Princeton University and a member of the Institute for Research and Innovation in Software for High Energy Physics (IRIS-HEP). He is also a founding member of the Scikit-HEP software community, a convener of the HSF PyHEP working group, and the author of Uproot and Awkward Array. He now leads these two software projects as Principle Investigator of OAC-2103945.

Project interests

Jim is interested in building coherency in data-oriented communities by developing interoperating tools, lines of communication, and shared understandings of how to work together. On the technical side, he promotes software built around high-performance data representations with interactive interfaces, and on the social side, networks built around small-scoped projects that fit together through agreed-upon protocols.