Talks

Over Twenty-five years into the internet era, over twenty years into the WorldWideWeb era, fifteen years into the Google era, and a few years past the Facebook/Twitter era, we've yet to converge on a new long-term methodology for scholarly research communication. I will provide a sociological overview of our current metastable state, and then a technical discussion of the practical implications of literature and usage data considered as computable objects, using arXiv as exemplar. From the physics standpoint, there is a surprising amount of statistical mechanics in text-mining and machine learning.

Weak gravitational lensing is a highly valued tool for inferring the structure of the spacetime metric between an observer and a cosmologically distant “wallpaper,” most commonly either the CMB or faint background galaxies. The best-measured quantities are the second derivatives of the projected scalar potential(s), which are manifested as apparent shearing and magnification of the wallpaper.  Given a collection of faint-galaxy images, what information can we extract about the shear and magnification that these images have undergone?  I will describe a new method of lensing inference that, unlike predecessors, is rigorously correct in the presence of noise and other observational realities, nearly optimal, and computationally feasible at the scale of current/future surveys like the Dark Energy Survey and the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope.