Meeting with Prof. Jackson Levi Said
The Division of Gravity Theory and Fundamental Interactions at the Institute of Theoretical Physics of the University of Wrocław, is pleased to invite you to a public lecture by Professor Jackson Levi Said from the University of Malta, Chair of the COST Action CosmoVerse. The lecture, entitled “Probing New Physics through Novel Machine Learning Techniques”, will take place on Tuesday, 6 May at 3:00 p.m. in Room 60 (Rzewuski Room) at the Faculty of Physics and Astronomy, at Max Born Square 9.
The lecture will be delivered in English. This event is organised within the framework of the IDUB Visiting Professors Programme.
About lecture:
The question of tensions in cosmology has become crucial to understanding whether the standard model of cosmology needs to be revisited or whether survey systematics are at play in recent cosmological observations. This has focused attention on the potential effects of systematics in recent observational measurements and what can be learned about how and where observations deviate from the concordance model. There has also been a concrete effort to develop new physics to meet this growing observational challenge. Machine learning has provided a new opportunity to probe these questions in a model-independent way.
However, there are many ways in which these new toolkits can be implemented to search for both new physics as well as systematics in data sets such as type 1a supernovae but also other data sets such as in gamma-ray burst data releases. These new techniques will be presented together with model-independent constraint analyses on their systematics.
Prof. Jackson Levi Said is a professor at the institute of Space Sciences and Astronomy at the University of Malta. His main research area is the interface of new fundamental physical theories with observational data in the context of cosmology, which has resulted in over 90 published papers. He’s supervised 6 PhD candidates and 7 MSc students with projects varied over the spectrum of cosmological perturbation theory to numerical and data analysis projects. He is also on several editorial boards including being Gateway Advisor for Cosmology on the EU’s Open Research Europe platform, as well as being an editor for Open Astronomy.
On the project side, Prof. Levi Said is Chair of the CosmoVerse COST Action [“CA21136 Addressing observational tensions in cosmology with systematics and fundamental physics”] which is a network based in Europe with a global reach, and which establishes funds for networking activities including conferences, schools, scientific missions and other activities connected with the open question of cosmological tensions. This is one of the more active COST Actions and brings together people working on fundamental physics theories, developers of novel data analysis toolkits, and observational cosmologists. Along with this, he has also been awarded several research grants on the general theme of developing machine learning tools to expose new fundamental physics in observational survey data. This includes the prestigious University of Malta Excellence Grant in Natural Sciences (2020) where machine learning techniques were developed to establish a base pipeline in which survey data was used to reconstruct new physical models. After this, as part of the Xjenza Malta FUSION R&I: Research Excellence Programme (2023), a follow-up project was conducted to build novel sampler codes to replace traditional constraint methodologies such as Markov chain Monte Carlo techniques. This is currently being combined into a full cosmology machine learning pipeline in Xjenza Malta R&I Thematic Programmes: Digital Technologies Programme (2024) which is a two-year project that will produce this competing data analyzer pipeline system.
Date of publication: 24.04.2025
Added by: M.K.
