Laurence Perreault-Levasseur (Université de Montréal): 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: Data-Driven High-Dimensional Inverse Problems: Insights from Strong Gravitational Lensing

Abstract: While upcoming observatories promise to enable percent-level precision science across many areas of astrophysics, realizing this potential hinges on our ability to develop new analysis methods that can meet the scale and complexity of the data. In many cases, traditional analysis methods can fall short of fully extracting the information contained in observations. Strong gravitational lensing, a nonlinear, non-convex, and high-dimensional inverse problem, exemplifies these challenges and opportunities. This talk explores recent advances in Bayesian image reconstruction and high-dimensional inference, with a focus on applications to lensing. Using score-based generative approaches, I will present methods for reconstructing high-fidelity astronomical images while addressing key challenges such as out-of-distribution data robustness, uncertainty quantification, and joint inference of hierarchical properties. I will also introduce statistical tools to assess the accuracy of posterior samples obtained with machine learning.  These advances in deep learning-based inference open new possibilities for studying complex systems at scale, particularly in the era of large surveys like LSST, Euclid, and the Roman Space Telescope.

Bio: Laurence Perreault-Levasseur is an Associate Professor at the Université de Montréal and an Associate Member of Mila, where she conducts research on the development and application of machine learning methods to cosmology. She is also a visiting scholar at the Flatiron Institute in New York City and the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo. Prior to that, she was a Flatiron Fellow for her postdoctoral studies at the Center for Computational Astrophysics at the Flatiron Institute and a KIPAC Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University. Laurence received her PhD from the University of Cambridge in 2015, where she conducted work on applications of open effective field theory to the formalism of inflation. She received her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from McGill University.