NVAITC Webinar Series on AI Applications in Computational Sciences
NVIDIA AI Technology Center Finland in collaboration with FCAI and CSC are pleased to announce a webinar series focusing on AI applications in computational sciences, with a goal of bringing together AI researchers and researchers in other fields. Each webinar will highlight a different scientific field and they are given by domain-specific experts who are using AI as part of their numerical simulation workflows. The webinars run from the beginning of March approximately every three weeks as part of the AI Across Fields Forum.
Session 6 - AI in Astrophysics
Prof. Brant Robertson (University of California, Santa Cruz)
Monday October 25, 17:00 Helsinki time
Abstract:
Astronomy is on the cusp of a data revolution, with facilities like the Vera Rubin Observatory (formerly LSST) and the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope (formerly WFIRST) posed to provide high-quality, multi band images over thousands of square degrees on the sky. With tens of billions of astronomical objects in these images, astronomers need to devise new methods to identify and classify stars and galaxies at scale. To address these challenges in astronomical data analysis, we have developed Morpheus, a new model for generating pixel-level morphological classifications of astronomical sources. Morpheus leverages advances in deep learning to perform source detection, source segmentation, and morphological classification pixel-by-pixel via a semantic segmentation algorithm adopted from the field of computer vision. I’ll review the model and its performance, and show applications to astronomical data including Hubble Space Telescope and James Webb Space Telescope surveys.
Bio:
Brant Robertson is a Professor in the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His research interests include theoretical topics related to galaxy formation, dark matter, hydrodynamics, machine learning, and numerical simulation methodologies. Brant was previously the John and Maureen Hendricks Visiting Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, NJ in 2019, and an Assistant Professor at the University of Arizona from 2011-2015. He held a Hubble Fellowship in the Astronomy Department at the California Institute of Technology from 2009-2011, and a Spitzer and Institute Fellowship at the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics and Enrico Fermi Institute at the University of Chicago from 2006-2009. Brant earned his Ph.D. in Astronomy from Harvard University in 2006, and received his B.S. in Physics and Astronomy at the University of Washington, Seattle in 2001. Brant was also a member of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field 2012 project, the Hubble Space Telescope program to take the deepest ever image of the sky in the near infrared. During 2014-2018, Brant also served as co-Chair of the LSST Galaxies Science Collaboration, a scientific organization charged with using the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope data to understand the formation and evolution of galaxies.
NVIDIA AI Technology Center (NVAITC) is a joint research center of the Finnish Center for Artificial Intelligence FCAI, NVIDIA, and the Finnish IT Centre for Science CSC. NVAITC accelerates research, education and adoption of artificial intelligence in Finland.