Date & Time

Time: 2:00-3:00 pm (CST), Oct.27th

Venue: IB 3106

Zoom ID: 715 337 7467

*Light refreshments will be provided

Speaker：

Prof. Nicola Napolitano

School of Physics and Astronomy

Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, Zhuhai Campus

Abstract：

Next-generation telescopes from Earth and from Space will soon observe billions of galaxies. With this amount of data, we can possibly solve some of the deep mysteries of the Universe like the nature of the dark matter and dark energy that fill together ~95% of the energy budget of the universe. Machine learning is a very effective way to handle huge datasets and manage their complexity and it is possibly the most advanced solution to fully exploit the scientific information encoded in these billion-galaxy datasets. I will introduce a project aimed at developing deep learning tools to perform tasks that might take months with standard techniques, on scales of hours or days. I will also explain how a machine that can distinguish a cat from a dog, can also predict the exact value of cosmological parameters.

BIO： 

Nicola R. Napolitano is a full professor at the Sun Yat-sen University, Zhuhai Campus (China), since 2018. He has been a staff Astronomer at the INAF – Osservatorio Astronomico of Capodimonte since 2005 and, previously, a Marie Curie Fellow at the Kapteyn Institute, Groningen. He received his PhD in Astrophysics in 2001 at the University Federico II of Naples. His research interests are galaxy dynamics and dark matter, extragalactic astronomy, cosmological simulations, large sky surveys and machine learning tools applied to astrophysics. He is a pivotal member of different International collaborations among which the Kilo Degree Survey, the China Space Station Telescope Survey, 4MOST, and he is PI of the Fornax VLT Spectroscopic Survey (FVSS).

He has been PI of different National and International grants, including a Horizon 2020 International Training Network (ITN) as unit coordinator, a Hundred Top Talent program and a Research Grant for Excellent International Scholar from the Science National Foundation of China. In 2022 he received the Yixian Prize for Excellent scholars from the Sun-Yat Sen University. He has also been a member of different National advice committees (for Galaxy and Cosmology) and telescope allocation committees, and he is a member of the International Astronomical Union and the Chinese Astronomical Union. He has published more than 180 peer review papers and has been invited to tens of conferences and top-ranked Universities and Research Centres.