dissertation transits

Schölkopf, Foreman-Mackey, and I discussed the single-transit project, in which we are using standard machine learning and a lot of signal injections into real data to find single transits in the Kepler light curves. This is the third chapter of Foreman-Mackey's thesis, so the scope of the project is limited by the time available! Foreman-Mackey had a breakthrough on how to split the data (for each star) into train, validate, and test such that he could just do three independent trainings for each star and still capture the full variability. False positives remain dominated by rare events in individual light curves.

With Dun Wang, we discussed the GALEX photon project; his job is to see what about the photons is available at MAST, if anything, especially anything about the focal-plane coordinates at which they were detected (as opposed to celestial-sphere coordinates). This was followed by lunch at facebook with Yann LeCun.