Title Text

University of Delaware

Department of Physics and Astronomy

federica bianco

Biden School of Public Policy and Administration

Data Science Institute

Vera C. Rubin Observatory

DSI Fellow

Currently at UD

ongoing NSF grants

Light Echoes w AI

Greg Dobler

Austin Broakmeier

Rare Earth Mineral Mining

Kyle Davis

Xi Peng

Microlensing in Big Data

PI Bianco

PI Klinger

PI Street

HDR Data Science Corps

PI Bianco

Stellar Flares in Big Data

Greg Dobler

Austin Broakmeier

Jing Gao

PI Bianco

Astrophysics

Geography

Data Science and AI

Pending and New grants

Astronomy AI Institute

FINESST (student support)

AI center of Excellence (PI Davis)

@fedhere

The Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time will start soon:

the largest astronomical survey ever attempted

weight 2e5 kg, max slew rate 0.2 rad/s

Most of the weight in a 10m disk
Angular momentum

5,000,000 ~kg~m^2 s^{-1}

2026

federica bianco - fbianco@udel.edu

@fedhere

At this level of precision,everything is variable, everything is blended, everything is moving.

SDSS

LSST-like HSC composite

SDSS 2x4 arcmin sq griz

MYSUC (Gawiser 2014) 1 mag shallower than LSST coadds

At this level of precision,everything is variable, everything is blended, everything is moving.

@fedhere

Ivezic (w Bianco) et al 2019

FASTLab works primarily on time-domain astronomy: astrophysicsal phenomena tha change on human time scales like exploding stars, and planet transits.

The Universe changes at every instance with phenomena at all energy and time scales

distributions of time gaps in 76 OpSims

Rubin LSST survey design

Rubin has involved the community to an unprecedented level in survey design this is a uniquely "democratic" process!

Survey Cadence Optimization Committee

The SCOC is advisory to the Rubin Observatory Operations Director (currently Bob Blum). It will begin its work in 2020, and will be a standing committee throughout the life of Rubin Observatory operations.

https://ls.st/rubinscoc

Will we discover new physics?

A survey of Machine Learning features and methods to discover unique objects and rare classes in regularly and irregularly sampled time series

Galarza, Bianco et al. 2021

Sparse, unevenly sampled Kepler time series

2D T-SNE projection of feature space

Weirdness score

Evenly sampled Kepler time series

When a new instrument opens a new window in the observable space we may discover new phenomena that challenge or understanding of the Universe

What survey strategy shoudl LSST adopt to maximize the chance of serendipitous discovery?

Xiaolong Li et al. 2022

now LSSTC Catalyst Fellow, J. Hopkins

Xiaolong Li et al. 2022

LSSTC Catalyst Fellow, J. Hopkins

AILE: the first AI-based platform for the detection and study of Light Echoes

NSF Award #2108841

P.I. Bianco

Light Ecoes are rare strophsyical pheonomena and a near-pessimal problem for AI, but with as much data as LSST AI is a necessity

imbalance classes
diverse morphology
low SNR

small training data
inaccurate labels

Dr. Somayeh Khakpash

LSSTC Catalyst Fellow, Rutgers

Rare classes will become common, but how do we know what we are looking at and classify different objects for sample studies?

Data-Driven Templates for stripped SESN

Dr. Somayeh Khakpash

now LSSTC Catalyst Fellow, Rutgers

Can AI replace forward modeling of physical processes?

Many problems in astrophysics require expensive simulations.

Can AI replace computationally expensive image processing now necessary for astrophysical discovery?

template

difference

Tatiana Acero-Cuellar et al. 2023

UNIDEL fellow

Saliency maps: what pixels matter?

template

difference

Tatiana Acero-Cuellar in prep

UNIDEL fellow

template

Can AI replace computationally expensive image processing now necessary for astrophysical discovery?

Why did the AI made the decision it made?

template

NO DIFFERENCE

Building interpetable classifiers for sparse, multimodal astrophysical time series

Sid Chiaini et al. 2024, submitted!

Astronomy and Computing

Stars that flare

Magnitude -> Flare energy

Star displacement -> color -> flare temperature

NSF Award #2308016

P.I. Bianco

Riley Clarke et al. submitted!

AstroPhysical Journl Supplements

Willow Fox Fortino+... 2024

Do we really need a spectrograph??

new transformer models!

Testing the performancde os SAM on astronomical objects

Rodiat Ayinde

NSF Award #2123264

P.I. Bianco

Continuous readout astronomical images for anomaly detection

Shar Daniels, PhD candidate

new transformer models!

7 bands

sparse data

As the nation’s first degree-granting Historically Black College and University (HBCU), The Lincoln University paved a path to higher education for African American males previously unavailable to them.