Prof. Xi-Long Fan invites you to participate in the Tencent meeting

Speaker: Nan Li

Strong Gravitational Lensing in the Big Data Era

whu-gw Group Meeting - Nan Li Seminar

Meeting time: 2020/6/13 10:00-12:00 (CST)

Click the link to join the meeting, or add to the meeting list: https://meeting.tencent.com/s/InkK6GqgGS1k

Conference ID: 408 299 698

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+8675536550000 (Mainland China) +85230018898 (Hong Kong, China)

Abstract

Gravitational lensing has become one of the most powerful tools available for investigating the “dark side” of the Universe. Cosmological strong gravitational lensing, in particular, probes the properties of the dense cores of dark matter halos and offers the opportunity to study the distant Universe at flux levels and spatial resolutions otherwise unavailable. Moreover, with the capabilities of next-generation telescopes, first with LSST, and then Euclid and WFIRST, astrophysics and cosmology are stepping into the big data era, i.e., tens of billions of objects will be observed. Hence, searching and modeling strong lenses in such enormous datasets require automated approaches. For this purpose, we build programs with machine learning algorithms. In this presentation, I will first describe the construction of pipelines for automated lens-finding and -modeling adopting traditional machine learning and deep learning, then present the performance of the pipelines on simulated data created by a lensing simulation program named PICS. Furthermore, beyond machine learning, I will also introduce some attempts of analyzing strong lenses in the manner of citizen science, which is an alternative way of machine learning for solving the big data problems in astrophysics and cosmology.

Bio

Nan Li earned his Ph.D. at NAOC in the field of astrophysics in 2013. Then, he had been working on simulations of gravitational lensing at the University of Chicago and Argonne National Lab as a postdoctoral fellow till 2017. From 2017 to 2019, he was a research fellow at the Centre for Astronomy and Particle Theory, the University of Nottingham, and his research interests are principally on utilizing machine learning techniques to deal with the upcoming big data problems in astrophysics and cosmology. He is now a faculty at NAOC（国家天文台） with a title of 100-talents-CAS, and his current work is mainly relevant to the Chinese Space-Station Survey Telescope.

You’re welcome to participate this Friday morning!