Speaker
Description
The coming decade of sky surveys will reveal the changing universe at a depth and scale we have never had. Meeting that opportunity takes more than better analysis — it reaches into how we choose what to observe, how we draw inference from what we collect, and how we model the physics underneath. I will introduce the NSF-Simons AI Institute for the Sky (SkAI), where astrophysicists, computer scientists, and statisticians are building AI that is shaped by physics from the start. I will then turn to one thread of that effort: stars. Interpreting stellar populations requires simulating them by the millions, yet each detailed simulation takes hours or days. Advanced model emulators and embedding the equations of stellar structure directly into neural models offers a way through and I will discuss our recent results.