Abstract: This talk shows how machine learning can address challenges in Astrophysics. We specifically focus on black hole simulations and supernova observations. First, we present a super-resolution technique for black hole simulations that avoids the need for high-resolution labels by leveraging the Hamiltonian and momentum constraints from general relativity. This method reduces constraint violations by one to two orders of magnitude. Next, we introduce Maven, a multimodal foundation model for supernova science. Using contrastive learning to align photometric and spectroscopic data, Maven achieves state-of-the-art results in classification and redshift estimation by pre-training on synthetic data and fine-tuning on real observations.
Bio: Thomas Helfer is a computational physicist specializing in deep learning and physics. Currently based at the Institute for Advanced Computational Science at Stony Brook University, Thomas was previously a postdoctoral fellow at Johns Hopkins and did his PhD with Eugene Lim at King's College in London. In his work, he looks to bridge topics; in his PhD, he bridged theoretical particle physics and gravitational waves. Now, in his postdoctoral work, he aims to find novel applications of deep learning in astrophysics.
*please note: this seminar will be held in a hybrid format*
Location: IACS Seminar Room OR Join Zoom Meeting
https://stonybrook.zoom.us/j/
Meeting ID: 986 1763 0652
Passcode: 882994