A new center brings astrophysics, data science, and AI together to answer some of the universe’s biggest questions.
How fast is the universe expanding? What is dark matter? Where did we come from?
These questions of life, the universe, and everything are just some of the big topics that motivate the new Center for Decoding the Universe at Stanford.
Launched in October, the center is an interdisciplinary partnership between Stanford Data Science (SDS) and the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology (KIPAC). The center is the newest of five faculty-led centers at SDS that bring together disciplines from across campus with data science expertise. The partnership was a perfect fit for KIPAC, which is itself a collaboration between Stanford and the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory.
“Compared to some other disciplines, astronomers are relatively early adopters of cutting-edge statistics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning tools,” said Risa Wechsler, KIPAC director and the Humanities and Sciences Professor and professor of physics in the School of Humanities and Sciences (H&S). Wechsler is director of the new center with co-director Susan Clark, assistant professor of physics in H&S. “We have a lot of fun advantages in astronomy in that we have a lot of data, and they are increasingly complex.”
‘A data revolution’
The amount of data available is increasing at an astronomical scale,