UNIL principal investigator
Prof. Valérie Chavez-Demoulin, Faculty of Business and Economics
UNIPD principal investigator
Prof. Alessandra Rosalba Brazzale, Dipartimento di Scienze Statistiche
Instrument
Joint seminar / conference involving early-stage researchers
Description
Modern cosmology heavily relies on statistical methods. At the same time, the recent explosion of available data, resulting from current and forthcoming astronomical sky surveys, provides unique challenges, and opportunities, to statistics. Successful collaboration grows from the ground. For this to happen, researchers, especially junior ones, need opportunities to meet each other and to exchange ideas. The aim of this project is to promote novel research and fuel new discoveries at the interface of two areas of much current interest – the statistical theory of extreme values and the study of cosmological observables, such as the cosmic microwave background radiation, the oldest light we can see, the clustering properties of large scale structure tracers and the cosmological signatures of gravitational lensing.
Activities
A three-day intensive residential workshop open to a limited number of ten highly motivated junior participants will be organised at the Monte Pennar Astronomical Observatory. In particular, the workshop will intertwine presentations of the state-of-the-art from the two fields of Statistics and Cosmology followed by a roundtable discussion with peer learning and coaching activities with the intent to foster the interchange of ideas among junior and senior researchers. Networking will be facilitated by the relaxed and enriching environment of the workshop venue.
Potential for follow-up activities
The workshop aims at creating an interdisciplinary network of collaborations among junior and senior scientists working at UNIPD and UNIL which may grant the technology transfer of the methods and models developed in spatial Extreme Value theory to the analysis of the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation and Large Scale Structure of the Universe. During the workshop, all activities will be mirrored on its web site. After the workshop, all participants will be invited to join the future hybrid talks organized by UNIL and UNIPD in line with the workshop theme, which will be announced through a special-purpose mailing list. The workshop participants may also be invited to submit a contribution for a possible special issue hosted by a major statistics journal.
