Looking up - 13 May 2022

Some listeners may have heard the term 'machine learning'. This is highly critical for modern astronomy, where computers take vast amounts of data from astronomical observations and sift through it to detect patterns or find anomalies. To put it in context for us is Dr Jasper Horrell who works at the University of Cape Town at the Inter-university Institute for Data Intensive Astronomy and also runs a company, Deep Data, using machine learning for security applications. You can find out more at www.deepdata.works. Astronomers these days must also be data scientists and computer geeks - it's a good thing we're living longer, that's a lot of learning to do.