Socio - economic impact at CERN: Social networks and onsite CERN visitors

Several important discoveries and developments have been made thanks to the CERN’s scientific research activities, such as for instance:  The World Wide Web was developed by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN in 1989. The Web was originally designed to be a system for physicists around the world to share information remotely. The underlying communication protocols and software were made available to the public in 1993 free of charge, so that anyone could run it with a server and a basic browser and continue the development of the infrastructure.  The Higgs boson was the last missing piece of the Standard Model of particle physics. The underlying theory was developed by Robert Brout, Peter Higgs and François Englert in the 19960ies, but it took 48 years to experimentally confirm it with the LHC and its international experiment facilities (CMS and ATLAS). This achievement was rewarded with the Nobel Prize in Physics 2013.  The Worldwide LHC computing GRID is a global integration of data storage and processing centers. The LHC experiments (ALICE, ATLAS, CMS and LHCb) produce approximately 15 petabytes of raw data each year. This data is stored, analysed and distributed to 170 centers in 42 countries around the world thanks to the GRID. Technical developments around this computing infrastructure have resulted in the development of numerous software tools, protocols, data storage and processing architectures; have spawned organization structures and cooperation in academic information processing and data curation. The initiative continues to be a driving force in advancing computing at a global scale.  Hadron therapy is an additional technology offered by the physicists to the oncologists, to treat tumours less invasively. Several particle accelerators based on CERN technologies pursuit treating tumours efficiently reducing the damage of surrounding tissue and reducing in fewer side effects (e.g. CNAO2 in Italy, MedAustron3 in Austria). Other findings, which should also be mentioned, are the W and Z bosons, creation of antimatter, violation of charge parity symmetry and light neutrinos and many others. The results of these activities have directly influenced society and improved it. Nowadays, it is impossible to imagine life without the WWW, without high-resolution medical imaging that is built on top of high-field superconducting magnet technologies conceived for research particle accelerators or technological innovations in the treatment of cancer. What is the measurable economic value of the socio - economic impact of CERN’s activities? This master thesis sheds light on this question by exploring one subset of economic value generation that is directly linked to CERN’s research programme with particle accelerators. It concerns in particular the estimation of the magnitude of different social and cultural domains. On one hand, social areas on the Internet such as the following are be analysed:  Videos on the YouTube platform, which talk about LHC.  Contributions that have been written on social media such as Twitter and Facebook about CERN’s research programme.  The number of visitors to CERN’s websites. On the other hand, the economic impact on onsite CERN visitors are be examined methodically and in detail, differentiating between group and private trips. The goal is to obtain an estimate for the economic value generated through spending of CERN visitors produced between June 2018 until May 2019. The results of this master thesis will be used as baseline input parameters and as baseline scenarios for a socio-economic impact assessments of CERN’s future project scenarios, in particular for a new, 100 km long circular particle collider infrastructure.