In group meeting last week, Stefan Rankovic (NYU undergrad) presented results on a very low-amplitude possible transit in the lightcurve of a candidate long-period eclipsing binary system found in the NASA Kepler data. The weird thing is that (even though the period is very long) the transit of the possible planet looks just like the transit of the secondary star in the eclipsing binary. Like just like it, only lower in amplitude (smaller in radius). If the transit looks identical, only lower in amplitude, it suggests that it is taking an extremely similar chord across the primary star, at the ..read more

The highlight of my day was a wide-ranging conversation with Suroor Gandhi (NYU) about cosmology, career, and the world. She made a beautiful connection between a part of our conversation in which we were discussing the transparency of the Universe, and new ways to study that, and a part in which we were discussing the transparency with which the University speaks about disciplinary and rules cases, which (at NYU anyway) is not very good. Hence the title of this post. On transparency of the Universe, we discussed the fact that distant objects (quasars, say) do not appear blurry must put some l ..read more

I have been buried in job season and other people's projects. That's good! Hiring and advising are the main things we do in this job. But I decided today that I need to actually start a longer writing project that is my own baby. So I started to turn the set of talks I have been giving about machine learning and astrophysics into a paper. Maybe for the new ICML Position Paper call ..read more

Today was a delight! In a working session, Clark Baker (Cambridge) gave a beautiful, conceptual and concrete description of how an echelle spectrograph works and the blaze and the resolution and etc. My favorite moment was the aha! moment I had when he described the Littrow condition. This was followed by Alicia Anderson (Cambridge) explaining how the data reduction proceeds. Then she and Federica Rescigno (Exeter) helped us install the data-reduction software for the ESO instruments (ESPRESSO, HARPS-N, etc) and we started reducing raw echelle data. Before all this there was a wide-ranging dis ..read more

OMG I actually just submitted an actual paper, with me as first author. I submitted to the AAS Journals, with a preference for The Astronomical Journal. I don't write all that many first-author papers, so I am stoked about this. If you want to read it: It should come out on arXiv within days, or if you want to type pdflatex a few times, it is available at this GitHub repo. It is about how to combine many shifted images into one combined, mean image ..read more

Today was day two of a meeting on generative AI in physics, hosted by MIT. My favorite talks today were by Song Han (MIT) and Thea Aarestad (ETH), both of whom are working on making ML systems run ultra-fast on extremely limited hardware. Themes were: Work at low precision. Even 4-bit number representations! Radical. And bandwidth is way more expensive than compute: Never move data, latents, or weights to new hardware; work as locally as you can. They both showed amazing performance on terrible, tiny hardware. In addition, Han makes really cute 3d-printed devices! A conversation at the end tha ..read more

Today was the first day of a two-day symposium on the impact of Generative AI in physics. It is hosted by IAIFI and A3D3, two interdisciplinary and inter-institutional entities working on things related to machine learning. I really enjoyed the content today. One example was Anna Scaife (Manchester) telling us that all the different methods they have used for uncertainty quantification in astronomy-meets-ML contexts give different and inconsistent answers. It is very hard to know your uncertainty when you are doing ML. Another example was Simon Batzner (DeepMind) explaining that equivariant me ..read more

At the end of the day I got a bit of quality time in with Danny Horta (Flatiron) and Adrian Price-Whelan (Flatiron), who have just (actually just before I met with them) created a new implementation of The Cannon (the data-driven model of stellar photospheres originally created by Melissa Ness and me back in 2014/2015). Why!? Not because the world needs another implementation. We are building a new implementation because we plan to extend out to El Cañon, which will extend the probabilistic model into the label domain: It will properly generate or treat noisy and missing labels. That will perm ..read more

Today Cameron Norton (NYU) gave a great brown-bag talk on the possibility that the dark matter might be asteroid-mass-scale black holes. This is allowed by all constraints at present: If the masses are much smaller, the black holes evaporate or emit observably. If the black holes are much smaller, they would create observable microlensing or dynamical signatures. She and Kleban (NYU) are working on methods for creating such black holes primordially, by modifying hte potential at inflation, creating opportunities for bubble nucleations in inflation that would subsequently collapse into small bl ..read more

I spent a lot of the day building a training set for a machine-learning problem set. I am building the training set out of the SDSS-V APOGEE spectra, which are like one-dimensional images for training CNNs and other kinds of deep learning tasks. I wanted relatively raw data, so I spent a lot of time going deep in the SDSS-V data model and data directories, which are beautiful. I learned a lot, and I created a public data set. I chose stars in a temperature and log-gravity range in which I think the APOGEE pipelines work well and the learning problem should work. I didn't clean the data, becaus ..read more