- Speaker
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Shirley Ho, Ph.D.Senior Research Scientist, Cosmology, Foundation Models for Science, CCA, Flatiron Institute
Presidential Lectures are a series of free public colloquia spotlighting groundbreaking research across four themes: neuroscience and autism science, physics, biology, and mathematics and computer science. These curated, high-level scientific talks feature leading scientists and mathematicians and are designed to foster discussion and drive discovery within the New York City research community. We invite those interested in these topics to join us for this weekly lecture series.
A full understanding of the evolution of the universe’s structure is one of the holy grails of modern astrophysics. Astrophysicists survey large volumes of the universe and compare the findings to computer simulations. Simulating the movement of billions of particles over billions of years is a daunting task, however, even when using the simplest physical models.
In this lecture, Shirley Ho will discuss her team’s work building a deep neural network that learns from a set of pre-run numerical simulations and predicts the large scale structure of the universe. Extensive analysis demonstrates that their deep-learning technique outperforms the commonly used fast approximate simulation method in predicting cosmic structure in the non-linear regime. They also show that their method can accurately extrapolate far beyond its training data and predict structure formation for significantly different cosmological parameters. This ability to extrapolate outside its training set is highly unexpected and remains a mystery.
About the Speaker
Ho’s research interests have ranged from fundamental cosmological measurements to exoplanet statistics to using machine learning to estimate how much dark matter is in the universe. Ho has broad expertise in theory, observation and data science. Her recent interest has been on understanding and developing novel tools in statistics and machine learning techniques and applying them to astrophysical challenges. Her goal is to understand the universe’s beginning, evolution and ultimate fate.
Ho earned her Ph.D. in astrophysical sciences from Princeton University in 2008 and her bachelor’s degrees in computer science and physics from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2004. She was a Chamberlain fellow and a Seaborg fellow at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory before joining Carnegie Mellon University in 2011 as an assistant professor. She became the Cooper Siegel Career Development Chair Professor and was appointed associate professor with tenure in 2016. She moved to Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory as a senior scientist in 2016. Ho joined the Simons Foundation in 2018 as leader of the Cosmology X Data Science group at the Center for Computational Astrophysics.