N3PDF is a research project led by PI Stefano Forte in the field of high-energy physics, financed by the European Research Council through an Advanced Grant (n° 740006) within the Horizon 2020 Research & Innovation Programme over a five-year span, starting October 1, 2018. The results of the project will be delivered in open-access form, mostly as papers and software. The project actively pursues the training of students at the undergraduate and graduate level, and the dissemination of its results and its science to students and the general public.

N3PDF aims at revolutionizing the theory of strong interactions and its application to the  determination of the structure of the proton, by introducing extensively techniques of artificial intelligence (AI). The core of the project is the development of an AI agent for the determinations of the parton distributions which encode the quark and gluon structure of the proton, using machine learning techniques. The project also includes an integrated set of studies on higher-order computations and resummation in perturbative QCD, and the development of parton distributions interfaced to resummation and Monte Carlo generators. The project will work in synergy with the NNPDF collaboration, to which it will provide methods and tools, and from which it will gain physics input and insight.