CCA Colloquium: Renee Hlozek

Title: Flashes of light from the sky to the brain

Abstract: In the sky: the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) on the Vera C. Rubin Observatory will generate a data deluge: millions of astronomical transients and variable sources will need to be classified from their light curves. I’ll discuss the efforts within the Dark Energy Science Collaboration to get ready for transient classification through efforts like public Photometric LSST Astronomical Time-series Classification Challenge (PLAsTiCC) and the Extended LSST Astronomical Time-series Classification Challenge (ELAsTiCC) was an expert challenge to LSST broker teams themselves to classify alert streams. I’ll place this work in the context of pushing from detections to cosmology.

Looking to the brain: I’ll present AstroBEATS, a pipeline derived from astronomical image analysis techniques and designed for high-resolution images of the brain. I’ll describe how AstroBEATS can be used to study the synaptic firing in the brain and to search for signs of neurodegeneration and describe the processes that generated this interdisciplinary research.