A reminder of tomorrow's Colloquium by Pavlos Protopapas of the IIC's
Time Series Center.
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Discovering Celestial Objects with Machine Learning
April 21, 2010, 4:00 pm
Room G-115, Maxwell Dworkin, 33 Oxford Street, Cambridge
Pavlos Protopapas, Research Associate, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for
Astrophysics, and Associate of SEAS
Abstract
As new instruments and technologies are employed to scan the universe,
an exponential increase in data is overwhelming astronomers.
Traditional analytical methods do not scale to these massive data
rates, and so machine learning techniques are called to the rescue.
This talk will present examples of how machine learning is used in the
Time Series Center to discover new objects in the sky—new variable
stars, new quasars and objects at the very edge of our solar system.
These discoveries are helping shape our understanding of the universe
we live in and are possible only with advanced machine learning methods.
About the Speaker
Pavlos Protopapas earned his B.Sc. in physics at Imperial College in
1990 and received his Ph.D. in theoretical nuclear physics in 1996
from the University of Pennsylvania, where his thesis provided a
solution to the Coriolis attenuation problem, an unsolved problem for
over 40 years. He served as the associate director of the National
Scalable Cluster Project collaboration, one of the initial attempts at
large-scale distributed computing on a grid-like model. His major
contribution at NSCP was the creation of the National Digital
Mammography Archive. After the completion of the technology transfer
for NDMA to IBM in 2001, he began working on large databases and data
mining in astronomy. He is a member of the outer solar system team for
Pan-STARRS and the data pipeline team on the TAOS project. At the IIC,
he directs the Time Series Center, an interdisciplinary team
cataloging and finding interesting phenomena in what will become the
largest collection of light curves in the world and applying
computational techniques to other types of time series. He is the
author of many refereed publications, ranging from nuclear physics to
astronomy and computer science. In recognition of his joint CfA-IIC
role, he is an Associate of the Harvard School of Engineering and
Applied Sciences.
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Refreshments served at 3:45 pm
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Mark your calendar for these upcoming IIC Colloquia:
Wednesday, Apr. 28: Daniel Janies, Biomedical Informatics, Ohio State
University
Wednesday, May 5: Jeannette M. Wing, National Science Foundation
For more information about IIC colloquia and other events :
http://iic.harvard.edu/events/upcoming
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