Welcome

Upcoming

March 2nd:

Presenting a public talk for Astronomy on Tap at Aeronaut Brewery in Somerville 6:30pm – 8:00pm.

Recent

Jan 30 – Feb 1:

Co-organized a workshop on Accelerating Physics with ML at MIT.

Jan 6 – 13:

Presented talk at the 241st American Astronomical Society (AAS) meeting in Seattle, WA.

December 19:

Presented talk at the University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia.

December 16:

Presented talk at the University of Southern Queensland, Australia.

December 12:

Presented talk at Centre for Astrophysics at Swinburne University in Melbourne, Australia.

August 21 – 24:

NASA Time Domain and Multimessenger (TDAMM) workshop in Annapolis, MD.

July 11 – 15:

Presented talk at “The National Astronomy Meeting (NAM) 2022” at The University of Warwick, UK.

May 16 – 20:

Presented talk at the “SciOps 2022: Artificial Intelligence for Science and Operations in Astronomy” conference in Garching near Munich, Germany.

March 4:

Guest Speaker at the MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research Journal Club.

March 16:

Invited speaker at the Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute Early Career Researcher Cosmology Seminar Series.

December 13, 2021:

Presented paper to the 2021 NeurIPS Workshop on Machine Learning and the Physical Sciences. Paper title “Real-time Detection of Anomalies in Multivariate Time Series of Astronomical Data”.

November 2, 2021:

Submitted paper titled “Real-time detection of anomalies in large-scale transient surveys” to the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS), https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.00036.

September 28, 2021:

Presented talk to the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite team.

September 1, 2021:

Started work as a postdoctoral researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

June 15, 2021:

Invited speaker at the Dark Energy Science Collaboration Supernova Machine Learning Topical Team

June 7, 2021:

Passed PhD Viva Examination.

April 23rd, 2021:

Submitted PhD Thesis to the University of Cambridge titled “Data-driven Discovery of Transients in the New Era of Time-Domain Astronomy”.

March 11, 2021:

Invited to speak at the Telstra (the major Australian Telescommunications company) AI ML forum on the applications of machine learning to time-series data.

January 8, 2021:

Jointly awarded the Paul Murdin Prize for the Best Published Journal Paper by a PhD student at the Institute of Astronomy, University of Cambridge, UK.

December 2, 2020:

Invited speaker at the Astronomy Seminar at the University of Sheffield, UK.

June 15, 2020:

Interviewed by the Bluesci Podcast from the Cambridge University Science Magazine on our App to help public interpretation of COVID-19 modelling.

April 8, 2020:

Media report on a project with Nick Taylor to help public understanding of COVID-19 modelling and restriction measures. Developed online webapp ‘lowhighcovid‘.

February 27, 2020:

Guest Speaker at the AI Seminar Series at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory at Stanford University, California, USA. 

February 26, 2020:

Guest Speaker at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) Science Seminar at MIT, Cambridge, USA. 

February 24, 2020:

Guest Speaker at the MIT Kavli Institute’s Monday Brown Bag Lunch Talk Series at MIT, Cambridge, USA. 

February 20, 2020:

Guest Speaker at the weekly SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Meeting in San Francisco, California, USA. 

February 17-18, 2020:

Invited speaker at the Astronomical Data Science Workshop at Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas, USA. 

November 22, 2019:

Invited speaker at the Astroparticle Seminar series in DESY (Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron) in Zeuthen near Berlin, Germany.

October 23 – 25, 2019:

TiDES (Time-Domain Extragalactic Survey) collaboration meeting in Dublin, Ireland.

September 23 – 26, 2019:

Presented a talk on classifying transients and detecting anomalies in upcoming large-scale surveys at the ESO conference on The extragalactic explosive Universe: the new era of transient surveys and data-driven discovery in Garching near Munich, Germany. 

August 19 – 23, 2019:

Invited speaker at the Hotwiring the transient universe workshop at Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA.

July 27 – August 1, 2019:

Presented a paper at the Joint Statistical Meeting 2019 conference in Denver, Colorado. Invited to the conference for being nominated for the Best Student Paper in Astrostatistics Award.

July 7 – August 17, 2019:

Research Fellow at the Kavli Summer Program in Astrophysics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, USA.

June 25 – 28, 2019:

Presented a talk on “Early classification of transients” at the Time-domain symposium at the European Week of Astronomy and Space Science (EWASS) in Lyon, France.

June 17 – 21, 2019:

Lectured an intensive summer computing course at Faculty of Maths, University of Cambridge. I helped construct a course that begins with the basics of Bash and Python, and continues on to complex useful problems for computational research such as: dealing with big data, solving ODEs, and using machine learning for classification. I will be lecturing the short course to undergraduate and summer students. See my GitHub for course details.

June 5, 2019:

Presented an IoA Wednesday seminar on “Real-time classification of explosive transients using Deep Learning”, Cambridge, UK

April 25 – 26, 2019:

Presented talk on RAPID at the “Enabling Multi-Messenger Astrophysics in the Big Data Era Workshop” at Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, USA.

April 22 – 24, 2019:

Attended the “Deaths & Afterlives of Stars” Spring Symposium at Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, USA.

March 8, 2019:

Presented work on Recurrent Neural Networks applied to time-domain astronomy at the Royal Astronomical Society Meeting on Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence applied to astronomy in London, UK.

March 3 – 6, 2019:

Visited University of California, Santa Cruz. Presented talk on “RAPID: Real-time classification of astronomical transients” to the UCSC Transients group

February 25 – March 1, 2019:

Attended the Dark Energy Survey Collaboration LSST Meeting at the University of California, Berkeley.

February 21-22, 2019:

Attended the LSST Broker Meeting at the University of California, Berkeley. Presented work on my RAPID software (https://astrorapid.readthedocs.io) for real-time photometric identification of astronomical transient objects.

February 19, 2019:

Presented talk at the Harvard University CHASC Topics in Astrostatistics on the Real-time classification of explosive transients using deep recurrent neural networks.

January 28, 2019:

Presented new transient classification software, RAPID – Real-time Photometric IDentification to the 4MOST Time-Domain Extragalactic Survey Collaboration (TiDES). https://astrorapid.readthedocs.io.

January 10, 2019:

Presented a poster on photometric transient classification at the 233rd American Astronomical Society’s Meeting. Included an audio description and animations: https://www.ast.cam.ac.uk/~djm241/rapid.

November 14, 2018:

Presented a poster at the Cantab Capital Institute for the Mathematics of Information – connecting with industry workshop in Cambridge, UK. Poster title: “Deep Learning for Real-Time Classification of Transient Time Series from Massive Astronomical Data Streams”

October 11, 2018:

Public talk for Clareity at the MCR, Clare College, University of Cambridge. Talk title: “What is “Dark Energy, and how can exploding stars and machine learning help us find out if Einstein was right?”

October 9, 2018:

LASAIR ZTF Broker meeting at the Royal Observatory Edinburgh, Scotland.

September 19 – 30, 2018:

Research visit to the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), Baltimore, USA.

September 16 – 19, 2018:

Presented cadence metric based on early transient classification at the LSST (Large Synoptic Survey Telescope) Cadence Hackathon at the Flatiron Institute in New York City, USA.

September 13 – 14, 2018:

Attended 4MOST-UK (4-metre Multi-Object Spectrograph Telescope) meeting at the University of Sussex, UK. Presented transient classification software to the TiDES collaboration (Time Domain Extragalactic Survey).

August 6 – 10, 2018:

Attended “Astro Hack Week: Data Science for Next-Generation Astronomy” at the Lorentz Centre, Leiden, Netherlands.

July 9 – 13, 2018:

Attended a workshop on “Transients in New Surveys: the Undiscovered Country ” at the Lorentz Centre, Leiden, Netherlands.

June 19 – 21, 2018:

Presented a talk at a workshop titled: “Planning for Surprises – Data Driven Discovery in the age of Large Data” at Oxford University, UK.

May 23 – 24, 2018:

Helped write National Science Foundation (NSF) whitepaper proposal at the Cyberinfrastructure for Multi-Messenger Astrophysics Workshop at the University of Maryland, USA.

May 9 – 26, 2018:

Research visit to the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), Baltimore, USA.

May 18, 2018:

Presented lunch talk at STScI Transient meeting, Baltimore, USA.

May 7-8, 2018:

Photometric LSST Astronomical Time-series Classification Challenge (PLAsTiCC) Workshop at the Simons Foundation Center for Computational Astrophysics, New York City, USA.

October 1, 2017:

I began my PhD at the University of Cambridge, UK.

August 9, 2017:

I attended and helped present the CAASTRO poster at the Australian Parliament House as part of the celebration of the ARC Centre of Excellence for All-Sky Astrophysics.

July 31, 2017:

I presented an update on OzDES and my development of a new spectral classification tool using Deep Learning at the ARC Centre for All-sky Astrophysics (CAASTRO) local area meeting.

July 9 – 14, 2017:

I presented my results and upcoming paper on a spectral classification tool for the Australian Dark Energy Survey at the Astronomical Society of Australia’s Annual Scientific Meeting in Canberra, Australia.

July 6 – 8, 2017:

I attended the Harley Wood Winter School at the Kioloa Coastal Campus, ANU.

June 11 – 16, 2017:

I attended the Dark Energy Survey Collaboration Meeting at the Kavli Institute of Cosmological Physics at the University of Chicago, USA. I presented my results on a new spectral classification software and my re-analysis of the SNIa cosmological sample.

April 13, 2017:

I presented work on the use of deep neural networks for supernova classification to the online “Machine Learning in Astronomy” meetings hosted by CSIRO.

March 27 – 31, 2017:

I worked with the Skymapper and Zooniverse team at the Siding Spring Observatory to search for Planet 9 in the worldwide citizen science project. I helped develop the pipeline to process the several million citizen classifications during the BBC’s Stargazing Live television series.

March 1, 2017:

I began work at the Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Mt Stromlo Observatory, Australian National University.

February 14, 2017:

I presented my work on modelling emission line spectra with multiple Gaussian components at the Gemini South Observatory in La Serena, Chile.

February 8, 2017:

I presented a tutorial on DASH for classifying supernova spectra to the OzDES collaboration.

January 22 – 26, 2017:

I attended the SOCHIAS annual conference in Marbella, Santiago, Chile. I co-presented work on “Violent star formation in galaxy interactions” with Dr. Veronica Firpo.

January 27, 2017:

I gave a presentation on the use of Deep Learning for supernova and spectral classification to the Astronomy and Astroinformatics departments at the University of Chile, Santiago.

December 15, 2016:

I graduated with Honours Class I in a Bachelor of Engineering (Electrical & Aerospace) and a Bachelor of Science (Physics) from the University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia.

December 5, 2016:

I began work at the Gemini South Observatory in La Serena, Chile as part of the AAO’s (Australian Astronomical Observatory) Australian Government Undergraduate Summer Studentship (AGUSS).