Today was the third day of Gotham Fest, three Fridays in September in which all of astronomy in NYC meets all of astronomy in NYC. Today's installment was at NYU, and I learned a lot! But many four-minute talks just leave me wanting much, much more.
Before that, I met up with Adrian Price-Whelan (Flatiron) and Kathryn Johnston (Columbia) to discuss projects in the Milky Way disk with Gaia and chemical abundances (from APOGEE or other sources). We discussed the reality or usefulness of the idea that the vertical dynamics in the disk is separable from the radial and azimuthal dynamics, and how this might impact our projects. We'd like to do some one-dimensional problems, because they are tractable and easy to visualize. But not if they are ill-posed or totally wrong. We came up with some tests of the separability assumption and left it to Price-Whelan to execute.
At lunch, I discussed machine learning with Gabi Contardo (Flatiron). She has some nice results on finding outliers in data. We discussed how to make her project such that it could find outliers that no-one else could find by any other method.
No comments:
Post a Comment