Ethan Anderes (UC Davis): Schmidt AI in Science Speaker Series

Organized by the University of Chicago’s Eric and Wendy Schmidt AI in Science 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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Title: Denoising Diffusion Models for Extragalactic Foregrounds in CMB Lensing Analysis

Abstract: Extragalactic foregrounds such as the cosmic infrared background (CIB) and thermal Sunyaev-Zel’dovich effect (tSZ) have complex, non-Gaussian structure that biases small-scale cosmic microwave background (CMB) analyses, especially lensing reconstruction at small scales. In this talk, I will present a generative modeling approach using denoising diffusion probabilistic models (DDPMs) trained on paired CIB-tSZ maps from the Agora suite of extragalactic sky simulations. When combined with a new inference technique called MUSE, developed by Millea and Seljak, DDPMs offer a promising tool for incorporating non-Gaussian random field modeling into CMB likelihood inference. This talk will assume no prior knowledge of the CMB or DDPMs. Joint work with K. Prabhu, S. Raghunathan, and L. Knox.

Bio: Ethan Anderes is a Professor of Statistics at the University of California, Davis. His research focuses on random field theory and spatial statistics, with applications in cosmology, particularly in cosmic microwave background gravitational lensing. He is a recipient of an NSF CAREER Award and was named a Chancellor’s Fellow at UC Davis. Before joining the UC Davis faculty, he was an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, and earned his Ph.D. in Statistics from the University of Chicago.