Machine Learning Researcher Part of Team Studying Evolution of Universe

Aaron AupperleeMonday, July 26, 2021

Associate Professor Aarti Singh will use her research on decision-making algorithms to study the evolution of the universe as part of the Simons Collaboration on Learning the Universe.

Aarti Singh, an associate professor in the Machine Learning Department, will use her research on decision-making algorithms to study the evolution of the universe as part of the Simons Collaboration on Learning the Universe. This international collaboration includes researchers from CMU, Columbia University, Harvard University, Princeton University, Lawrence Berkeley National Labs, the Flatiron Institute and international partners from Canada, France, Germany and Sweden.

For scientists to understand how the universe evolved, they must know its initial conditions and the physical laws governing those conditions. Since these aren't knowable, they can only be inferred through observation. The collaboration — directed by Greg Bryan, a professor of astronomy at Columbia University, and made possible by the Simons Foundation — will repeatedly select sets of initial conditions, predict how they would be observed now, compare that to real observations of galaxies and gas, and then compute the likelihood of those initial conditions.

For her part, Singh will help use machine learning for closed-loop, accelerated modeling of cosmological simulations. Machine learning can speed up the modeling by factors of millions or billions by training on the relatively small samples of full simulations.

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Aaron Aupperlee | 412-268-9068 | aaupperlee@cmu.edu