Christopher Messenger – Outsourcing astrophysics data analysis to the real experts

Abstract

As gravitational wave astrophysicists we find ourselves on the rising wave of machine learning sweeping through the physical sciences. In the past ~5 years many of us have embraced the world of machine learning and tried to apply it to our most challenging problems including the detection of gravitational wave signals buried deep in our detector noise. However, we are domain-experts in astrophysics and statistical analysis, not necessarily experts in machine learning. In this talk I will walk through the steps we took to outsource our problem to a collection of the world’s best machine learning experts – for free.

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Christopher Messenger
(University of Glasgow, UK)

Chris Messenger is a senior lecturer at the University of Glasgow, UK. He has been a long time member of the global gravitational wave collaboration (currently) known as the LIGO-Virgo-Kagra Collaboration (LVK). He obtained his undergraduate degree from the University of Birmingham, UK where he also completed his PhD on the topic of gravitational wave detection for continuously emitting sources. He then worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Glasgow, UK, at the Albert Einstein Institute in Hannover, Germany, and Cardiff University, UK before returning to Glasgow University as a Lord Kelvin Adam Smith Fellow. His current research interests lie in the field of gravitational wave cosmology and the introduction of machine learning and quantum computation to the problems of detection and Bayesian parameter estimation for any and all types of gravitational wave signal.