2015-05-11

talks all day; Dr Gorbenko

Roberto Sanchis-Ojeda (Berkeley) arrived for a few days of hacking. He is responsible for finding some very short-period transiting exoplanets. We didn't get a chance to set our goals for the day, because the day was packed with talks:

Victor Gorbenko (NYU) gave an absolutely excellent PhD defense. Congratulations Dr Gorbenko. Among other things, he was considering the difference between the theoretical (analytic) action of massless modes on the 1+1 worldsheet of a string (not a 0+1 wordline but s 1+1 worldsheet) and a lattice calculation. In this comparison, he found massive modes. He very nicely connected this work to larger questions in string theory, but also to the origins of string theory in QCD.

At lunch, Guido D'Amico (NYU) spoke about axions, axion–photon interactions, and cosmic transparency. This is related to work I did with Bovy and with More in the optical. He advertised some clever ideas he has about about using the Planck data to constrain this sector using millimeter wavelengths. He has been implementing some of these ideas at #astrohackny.

At the end of the day, Neil Lawrence (Sheffield) spoke about deep machine-learning models built from nested Gaussian Processes. The methods show a lot of promise and connect well to things we are thinking about in CampHogg.

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