Bernhard Schölkopf arrived for a couple of days of work. We spent the morning discussing radio interferometry, Kepler light-curve modeling, and various things philosophical. We headed up to the Simons Foundation to the Simons Center for Data Analysis for lunch. We had lunch with Marina Spivak (Simons) and Jim Simons (Simons). With the latter I discussed the issues of finding exoplanet rings, moons, and Trojans.
After lunch we ran into Leslie Greengard (Simons) and Alex Barnett (Dartmouth), with whom we had a long conversation about the linear algebra of non-compact kernel matrices on the sphere. This all relates to tractable non-approximate likelihood functions for the cosmic microwave background. The conversation ranged from cautiously optimistic (that we could do this for Planck-like data sets) to totally pessimistic, ending on an optimistic note.
The day ended with a talk by Laura Haas (IBM) about infrastructure (and social science) she has been building (at IBM and in academic projects around data-driven science and discovery. She showed a great example of drug discovery (for cancer) by automated "reading" of the literature.
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