Events During the Week of May 15th through May 22nd, 2022
Sunday, May 15th, 2022
- Academic Calendar
- iSchool Graduation Celebration
- Time: 10:00 am - 12:00 pm
- Abstract: Celebration of our December 2021, May 2022, and August 2022 graduates. Greetings to All iSchool Graduates, Graduates' Guests, Current Students, Faculty and Staff, You are cordially invited to this spring’s in-person iSchool Graduation Celebration, which will take place in the Alumni Lounge at the Pyle Center. The celebration will include remarks and light refreshments. Components of the celebration that may be either remote synchronous or asynchronous via a Canvas celebration site are still being determined. More details coming soon! CONTACT: 263-2900, tcobb@wisc.edu
Monday, May 16th, 2022
- No events scheduled
Tuesday, May 17th, 2022
- Network in Neutrinos, Nuclear Astrophysics, and Symmetries (N3AS) Seminar
- Implicit correlations within phenomenological parametric models of the neutron star equation of state
- Time: 2:00 pm
- Place: Join Zoom Meeting Meeting ID: 912 3071 4547
- Speaker: Isaac Legred, Caltech
- Abstract: Astrophysical probes of neutron stars such as gravitational-wave and x-ray pulse profile modeling have improved prospects for inferring the nuclear equation of state at high densities. To connect these observations and infer the properties of dense matter and neutron stars simultaneously, models for the equation of state are introduced. One class, parametric models, such as the commonly used piecewise-polytope and spectral parameterizations, rely on carefully engineered functional forms that reproduce a large array of realistic equations of state. In this talk I will compare these parametric models to a novel model based on Gaussian processes and show that parametric models impose unphysical, and sometimes opaque, correlations between density scales. Such inter-density correlations result in tighter constraints that are unsupported by data, and can lead to biased inference of the equation of state and of individual neutron star properties.
Join Zoom Meeting
Meeting ID: 912 3071 4547
- Host: A. Baha Balantekin
Wednesday, May 18th, 2022
- Physics ∩ ML Seminar
- Simulation-based inference for astrophysical dark matter searches
- Time: 11:00 am - 12:15 pm
- Place: Online Seminar: Please sign up for our mailing list at www.physicsmeetsml.org for zoom link
- Speaker: Siddharth Mishra-Sharma, MIT
- Abstract: In this talk, I will motivate the use of simulation-based machine learning methods for new physics searches, in particular for understanding the nature of dark matter, using astrophysical observations. After showcasing several applications and discussing advantages as well as caveats against traditional techniques, I will spend the bulk of the talk describing a study of gamma-ray data from the center of the Milky Way where the goal is to characterize a potential signal of dark matter – the so-called Galactic Center Excess. While emphasizing the modeling and inference challenges associated with this task, I will discuss how leveraging machine learning methods offers a path towards resolving the long-standing puzzle of the origin of the signal.
Thursday, May 19th, 2022
- No events scheduled
Friday, May 20th, 2022
- No events scheduled