Séminaires, soutenances

The Fourth Paradigm in Astronomy: from ESA/Gaia and beyond

par Alberto KRONE-MARTINS (Universidade de Lisboa, CENTRA/SIM)

Europe/Paris
Description

"Astronomy (...) it was she who made us a soul capable of comprehending Nature".

Whether or not we agree with Henri Poincaré’s central view of Astronomy, this Science has historically been deeply connected to, and in many cases motivated, the amplification of human sensitive and cognitive capabilities.


During this talk I would like to openly discuss the “fourth paradigm of Science” concept in Astronomy. This is a thought pattern that evolves the relation between Science and Informatics from the simple notion of “using a tool” towards a deeper degree of inter-dependency. To do so, I will briefly present some examples of my scientific research that are entrenched in this concept, as galaxy morphology inference from ESA/Gaia data, the supervised discovery of new strong gravitational lenses, the semi-supervised discovery of new stellar clusters and the unsupervised construction of galaxy catalogues.


Finally, I would like to profit from the talk to discuss if it will still be possible to do forefront discoveries in the era of large particle colliders, cosmic ray observatories and astronomical surveys as LSST, without some type of machine-assisted and continuously collaborative thinking. 

The talk will be accessible to non-astronomers.

 

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Alberto Krone-Martins is a researcher at the Universidade de Lisboa. He crossed the Universidade de São Paulo (Brazil), Université de Bordeaux (France) and Caltech (USA), mostly working at the interface of Astronomy, Space Astrometry, Informatics and Statistics. Besides industrial responsibilities related to satellite and spacecraft navigation, he is currently
responsible for a number of scientific work-packages in the ESA/Gaia DPAC (Data Processing Consortium) and also co-chairs the 
Cosmostatistics Initiative.