It is such a great meeting, this meeting. And I think it is because we spent a lot of time early on in this project in building community. That is, we made sure we feel like we are part of a greater whole. Learning from this, I would love to try to bring this community-first thinking to all the things I do. It requires attention!
In the middle of the day, the core team on the project met with the funding officers and we discussed the ramp-down and close-out of the grant. This has two important and very difficult aspects. The first is that we need to finish what we started: The project is to learn about how to do interdisciplinary things in the university, and to communicate successes and failures to other universities and the larger world. I have a role in that and I agreed to take on some of this final communication. The second is to take the best things we are doing in this funded project and figure out how to continue them after the funding is no longer flowing from these granting agencies. That's critical to our success at the NYU CDS. I left the meeting energized, but a bit concerned about what I need to do in the next year or so!
After tremendously interesting discussions and talks, the day ended with a brainstorming session with Richard Galvez (NYU) about possible projects that bring machine learning to the Gaia data. We worked through some simple ideas that I have been thinking about. I like the idea of modeling the Gaia data with deep learning, because even a deep network acting on such small (per-star) data will be tractable, and maybe even interpretable! We ended on optimism, but not with a final decision about what we are going to do.
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