News from the IceCube Neutrino Observatory and Related Phenomenology It has been ten years since IceCube, a neutrino detector embedded in the Antarctic glacier, has detected high-energy astrophysical neutrinos. In this informal talk, I will report on the latest results from IceCube and point out opportunities for searches for new...
Community, Standardisation, and Reproducibility: does open-source software help advancing high-energy astrophysics? In this talk, I will discuss how high-energy astrophysics, and gamma-ray astronomy in particular, are being transformed by several community-based efforts to develop standardised data and open-source software both for statistical analysis and physical modelling. In the first part...
Pulsar polarization: explanations and applications Pulsar radio emission, and particularly its polarization, is a key probe of neutron star physics. This, in turn, means that we can use it to advance searches for gravitational waves and to map out the invisible structures of the galaxy. However, new and improved observations...
Machine Learning: from Quantum Technologies to Neuromorphic Devices
Evidence for high-energy neutrinos from the Galactic plane The Milky Way, our home galaxy, is visible to the eye as a faint band of light in the night sky. This emission from the Galactic plane extends over a wide range of the electromagnetic spectrum, from radio to gamma rays. A...
Looking for dark matter in gamma rays - can machine learning help? We live in a ‘golden’ time for studies of high-energy (HE) astrophysics as a series of satellite and ground based telescopes currently provide high-precision data, critical to answer the century old questions on the origin of cosmic rays...
Civilian and military use of nuclear technology To exploit nuclear technology for civilian purposes, in particular energy production, a variety of facilities - a nuclear fuel cycle - is necessary, comprising reactors and uranium enrichment plants among others. These same facilities, however, produce the fissile materials that are required to...
Exploring the signatures of cosmic ray feedback effects in galaxy ecosystems Cosmic rays go hand-in-hand with violent and energetic astrophysical conditions. They are an active agent within galactic and circumgalactic ecosystems, where they can deposit energy and momentum, modify the circulation of baryons, and even have the potential to regulate...
Recent Highlights from the VERITAS AGN Program VERITAS is one of the world’s most sensitive detectors of astrophysical very high energy (VHE; E > 100 GeV) gamma rays. This observatory began full-scale operations in 2007, and more than 8,000 hours of its good-weather observations have been targeted on active galactic...
Multi-messenger Lighthouses of the Universe: The many extremes of Active Galactic Nuclei Abstract: Active galactic nuclei (AGN) make the most significant contribution to the overall energy balance in the Universe in all electromagnetic bands not dominated by the cosmic microwave background. A good understanding of physical processes and phenomena driving...
Improving our understanding of machine learning robustness - in microscopy and beyond A central goal when applying machine learning in the biomedical research and medical imaging is to answer relevant interdisciplinary questions robustly and reliably across various setups and ideally modalities; however, this is challenged by different imaging systems, differences...
Muon Hunting with the Crowd: Combining Humans and Machines to Solve Big Data Problems In this presentation, I will describe the Zooniverse.org citizen science platform as a tool to gather labels from over 2.7 million dedicated volunteers worldwide who are motivated to participate in scientific research. Hundreds of research teams...