Josh Bloom — The Link Between Astronomy and ML

Josh explains how astronomy and machine learning have informed each other, their current limitations, and where their intersection goes from here.

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Josh is a Professor of Astronomy and Chair of the Astronomy Department at UC Berkeley. His research interests include the intersection of machine learning and physics, time-domain transients events, artificial intelligence, and optical/infared instrumentation.
Much of Josh's current group activities can be found at ML4Science.

Connect with Josh:
📍 Twitter:   / profjsb  
📍 Personal Website: https://joshbloom.org/

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⏳ Timestamps:
0:00 Intro, sneak peek
1:15 How astronomy has informed ML
4:20 The big questions in astronomy today
10:15 On dark matter and dark energy
16:37 Finding life on other planets
19:55 Driving advancements in astronomy
27:05 Putting telescopes in space
31:05 Why Josh started using ML in his research
33:54 Crowdsourcing in astronomy
36:20 How ML has (and hasn't) informed astronomy
47:22 The next generation of cross-functional grad students
50:50 How Josh started coding
56:11 Incentives and maintaining research codebases
1:00:01 ML4Science's tech stack
1:02:11 Uncertainty quantification in a sensor-based world
1:04:28 Why it's not good to always get an answer
1:07:47 Outro

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Links:
1. Big Rip, the hypothesis that the universe will eventually rip itself apart
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Rip
2. TESS satellite, a space telescope designed to look for exoplanets
https://www.nasa.gov/content/about-tess/
3. ML4Science, Josh's research group
https://www.ml4science.org/home
4. Galaxy Zoo, a crowdsourcing project to classify galaxies
https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/z...
5. Pea galaxy, a type of galaxy first dsicovered in 2007 as part of Galaxy Zoo
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pea_galaxy
6. "Searching for exotic particles in high-energy physics with deep learning" (Baldi et al., 2014), using ML to "rediscover" the Higgs Boson
https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomm...
7. BAIR (Berkeley AI Research), a research group that Josh is a faculty member on
https://bair.berkeley.edu/

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