Virtual seminar on Machine Learning and Adaptive Optics
Our Liverpool Virtual Seminar Series on Data Intensive Science will continue on Tuesday 11th April 2023 at 10am BST. The seminar will be given by Jesse Granney (Postdoctoral Fellow at Australian National University College of Science) and Charles Gretton (TechLauncher Program Convener at Australian National University College of Engineering, Computing and Cybernetics). They will present “Machine Learning and Adaptive Optics”.
Seminars in this series cover R&D outside of the data intensive science CDT’s core research areas and give an insight into cutting edge research in this area. At the end of the talk there will be a Q&A session with the speaker.
About the talk
Atmospheric turbulence severely limits the quality of science able to be retrieved using ground-based astronomical telescopes. As these telescopes continue to grow larger, this effect becomes more pronounced, demanding the use of real-time “adaptive optics”. The current era of adaptive optics comes with unique data challenges, including the processing of tens of thousands of noisy measurements to compute thousands of commands every, all within a couple of milliseconds. Traditionally, this real-time demand would only allow linear control laws to be employed, but the massive parallelisation allowed by CNN-based solutions is beginning to attract attention in the adaptive optics landscape as a non-linear alternative. CNNs (namely, the CGAN and UNet) promise a significant improvement to the quality of science achievable in astronomical instruments. Charles and Jesse will give a gentle introduction to the general problem statement in the context of adaptive optics, and an overview of their work in this domain.
About the speakers
Since 2018 Charles Gretton has been convening the much celebrated and loved TechLauncher program at the Australian National University. That program comprises 35 teams of students working collaboratively and professionally together to create and leverage technology innovations to build and scale new enterprises, or fulfil statements of work and build relationships with business, industry, and government organisations in the Canberra region and around the world. He also leads projects on scaling logical inference with commonwealth government organisations, actively contributes to projects in the aerospace and astronomy domains. In mid-2015 he co-founded a Data61 spinout supported by the Coca-Cola founders platform. He was a senior researcher with the Data61 (NICTA) lab in Canberra from August of 2011. Prior to that, he was a research fellow with the Intelligent Robotics Lab at the University of Birmingham and a researcher with the NICTA lab in Brisbane.
Jesse Cranney began his post-doc at the Australian National University in 2021, where he is now leading the development of the adaptive optics control system for the next generation adaptive optics system: MAVIS, due to be seeing first-light at the ESO Very Large Telescope in Chile in 2027. Jesse is also responsible for the development of key wavefront sensing technologies for use in instruments of the Giant Magellan Telescope, currently under construction in Chile. Combining his experience in adaptive optics instrumentation with his passion for machine learning, it has been with great pleasure that Jesse has been able to collaborate on many projects at the cutting edge of both.
How to attend
Participation is free, but you need to register to attend this and other webinars in the series. For more information and how to register please follow this link. Once registered, you will receive the Zoom connection details on the morning of the online seminar.
The seminar details
Speakers: Jesse Granney (Postdoctoral Fellow at Australian National University College of Science) and Charles Gretton (TechLauncher Program Convener at Australian National University College of Engineering, Computing and Cybernetics).
Seminar title: “Machine Learning and Adaptive Optics”
Date/Time: Tuesday 11th April at 10am BST