2017-05-01

Dr Sanford

I gave the CCPP Brown-Bag talk today, about how the Gaia mission works, according to my own potted story. I focused on the beautiful hardware design and the self-calibration.

Before that, Cato Sanford (NYU) defended his PhD, about model non-equilibrium systems in which there are swimmers (think: cells) in a homogenous fluid. He used a very simple Gaussian Process as the motive force for each swimmer, and then asked things like: Is there a pressure force on a container wall? Are there currents when the force landscape is non-trivial? And so on. His talk was a bit bio-stat-mech for my astrophysical brain, but I was stoked with the results, and I feel like the things we have done with Gaussian Processes might lead to intuitions in these crazy situations. The nice thing is that if you go from Brownian Motion to a GP-regulated walk, you automatically go out of equilibrium!

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