During my time at ESA, I mentored a Master’s student, Matej Kosiba from Masaryk University, and we recently published a paper together on using convolutional neural networks to detect clusters of galaxies (https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.05998). You see, the detection of galaxy clusters is extremely out-dated. Typically a wavelet filtering algorithm is applied on X-ray images to pull…
I was born in 1990. Mankind first stepped on the moon on July 20th 1969. We did it again in November of the same year, again in February and July of 1971, and in April and December of the following year. In total there have been 12 men to have set foot on another celestial…
Russian space agency ROSCOSMOS this week announced the opening of the next selection programme of cosmonauts (Russian astronaut) see: https://twitter.com/roscosmos/status/1135521818301870083 Don’t read Russian? No problem, I have you sorted: You’re welcome! Applications are accepted from Russian citizens between now and 1 June 2020, and at the end of it there will be 4-6 newly selected…
Throughout my life I must’ve given hundreds of talks now, and almost always I’m asked before I talk whether or not I’m nervous. Who doesn’t feel anxiety when speaking in front of a crowd? Here’s a collection of tips I compiled to help prepare for public speaking: Make a list of the key points you…
Trying to blog even semi-regularly turns out to be difficult! I didn’t even notice that its been 9 months since my last post! But last month I have been busy setting up my new youtube channel ‘space mog’ as well as other accompanying social media sites (instagram, facebook). Hopefully this will help steer my career…
At StanCon 2018 Helsinki, a couple of us gathered together for this thing Breck organised – birds of a feather, to discuss topics of interest with each other. I think there were about 8 of us interested in surrogate models and these are some of the notes from that meeting. So what is a surrogate…
I’m currently working on a problem where I need to sample from a very specific custom pdf. It has taken me a lot of time to get this pdf written down but now that I finally have it, I’m just missing one key ingredient… the selection function! This is when you have some underlying data…
I learned early on in my PhD that binning is not a good idea. The loss of information from binning will lead to biased results. Here I demonstrate this with a simple linear regression toy model. #generate toy data x = runif(nc, 13,15) y = 22+1.5*x+rnorm(nc, 0,0.5) #bin in y variable nbin = 10 ybins…
31.10.2017 The first ever dark matter day… Why the particle physicists decided to it should coincide with halloween I have no clue. Clearly the trending tags will be dominated by the later occasion right? Anyway I made a video about dark matter. I hope you enjoy it!
Okay so a few weeks ago at work a colleague asked me where I was from in the UK, and I replied “Oh, it’s a small little town, you’ve probably never heard of it, Coventry. It’s close to Birmingham”. This is a natural response for me given that I lived in the US for a…
