2016-06-08

Gaussian processes, black-hole dark matter

At group meeting, Dan Cervone (NYU), who works on spatial statistics for sports and climate, went over the basics of Gaussian Processes for interpolation. This is all related to Boris Leistedt's project to determine galaxy photometric redshifts with a flexible spectral energy distribution model.

I had lunch with Kat Deck (Caltech) and Yacine Ali-Haimoud (JHU) and Kyle Cranmer (NYU). We talked about various things, but especially whether the dark matter could be massive (LIGO-detected!) black holes. One idea that would be easy to look at, that Scott Tremaine (IAS) mentioned to me a few years ago, is whether the dark matter granularity could be limited by looking at the dispersal of cold tidal streams of stars.

Late in the day, I worked on my few-photon image-reconstruction toy problem, tuning the stochastic gradient and going to smaller numbers of photons per image. It works well and I am excited about the implications for diffraction microscopy.

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