Benjamin Wandelt (Johns Hopkins University): AI+Science Schmidt Fellows Speaker Series

Organized by the University of Chicago’s Eric and Wendy Schmidt AI in Science Postdoctoral Fellowship Program.

Agenda
4:00pm – 4:45pm:  Presentation
4:45pm – 5:00pm:  Q&A
5:00pm – 5:30pm: Reception

Meeting location
William Eckhardt Research Center. Room 401
5640 S Ellis Avenue, Chicago, IL 60637
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Abstract: Cosmologists strive to uncover the mysteries of the origin, composition, evolution, and fate of the cosmos from all the information the sky has to offer. I will discuss how Machine Learning is revolutionizing our ability to confront computational models with data by making previously intractable problems tractable. Recent breakthroughs include AI-accelerated simulations that generate galaxy catalogs with remarkable fidelity, generative models that reconstruct the universe’s initial conditions from today’s complex cosmic web, and methods that enable rapid Bayesian model comparison. If time permits I will also comment on recent work that addresses more general challenges in scientific inference: automatically identifying informative summaries from data, estimating model dimensionality, and making inferences robust against model misspecification. These methods enable end-to-end forward modeling and inference pipelines connecting fundamental physics with observations. At the same time cosmology provides an ideal testbed for method development in machine learning: vast open datasets spanning diverse physical regimes, well-defined theoretical predictions for validation, and problems that stress-test inference methods at scale. This symbiotic relationship advances both fundamental methodology and our understanding of the universe’s detailed history from the Big Bang to the present day.

Professor Benjamin D. Wandelt researches and teaches in the fields of Cosmology, Physics, Astronomy, Artificial Intelligence, Statistics, and Computing.

Professor Wandelt (Ph.D. in astrophysics from Imperial College, London) held early career research fellowships at the Theoretical Astrophysics Centre (Niels Bohr Institute) in Copenhagen and at the Department of Physics at Princeton University. In 2001, he became assistant professor in the Departments of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, receiving tenure in 2006. In 2010 he was awarded the International Chair of Theoretical Cosmology at Sorbonne University and the Institut d’Astrophysique de Paris. In 2011 he was the founding co-director of the Institut Lagrange de Paris in cosmology, astro-particle, and theoretical physics and was named director in 2014. Professor Wandelt has held long-term visiting faculty positions at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics; Caltech; Princeton University; the Institute for Advanced Studies, Princeton; and NYU; and joined the Center for Computational Astrophysics at the Flatiron Institute in New York City in 2017.

Professor Wandelt’s research in theoretical, computational, and statistical astrophysics connects fundamental physics and cosmology with astronomical data ranging from stars to the largest scales accessible to observations. He has won multiple awards in several countries such as the Xerox award, the Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel prize, the Sofja Kovalevskaja award, and a senior Excellence Chair of the Agence Nationale de Recherche. He co-led the Primordial Non-Gaussianity analysis for ESA’s Planck mission and won multiple prizes as a Planck Scientist and core team member, including the 2018 Gruber Prize in Cosmology. He was elected Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2015 and Fellow of the International Association of Astrostatisticians in 2019. He is the creator of Cosmology@Home, a world-wide participatory computing platform with over 60,000 members.

Parking
Campus North Parking
5505 S Ellis Ave
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