12:00–1:00 pm ERC 501
Host: Jeff McMahon
Andrea Bryant "Seismic investigation of Saturn's moon Titan using full waveform modeling"
NASA will launch the Dragonfly rotorcraft in 2027; it is scheduled to land on Titan in the mid-2030s. The rotorcraft itself is a dual-quadcopter that will hold many instruments, including a seismometer. In this talk I will introduce and present some topics of my work on modeling seismic activity of Titan.
Titan is one of the largest moons of the Solar System and contains both a thick atmosphere and a subsurface ocean. Due to its unique composition, Titan is of much interest to a broad range of scientific disciplines including the astrophysics and astrobiology communities, particularly for its utility for studying hazy Titan-like exoplanets, as well as its being a natural astrobiology laboratory.
Jason Poh "Towards Automated Strong Lens Modeling with Simulation-Based Inference"
Future Surveys like Rubin Observatory and the Roman Space Telescope are projected to discover tens to hundreds of thousands of new galaxy-galaxy strong lenses. Scaling conventional parametric lens modeling techniques to handle these numbers of lenses will be challenging. I will provide a brief overview of conventional parametric lens modeling. Then, I will provide an introduction to simulation-based inference, and apply this paradigm to the problem of parameter inference from strong lenses. I will discuss some results and some methods of determining if our trained posterior estimators are well-calibrated. I will also compare the results to that from a Bayesian Neural Network.
