The use of machine learning in cosmology

On Wednesday, May 24, ASEF, in cooperation with the Student organization Mafia, organized a popular science lecture as part of the ASEF Young Minds Lecture Series. This time, we were introduced to the physical world of cosmology by Tijan Prijon, a physics student at the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics at the University of Ljubljana, where he will graduate this year and continue his studies next year at ETH Zurich in Switzerland. He completed his ASEF research visit in Berkeley at the University of California, under the mentorship of Dr. Uroš Seljak.

Tijan presented his experience as a research visitor and explained in depth his research work on predicting cosmological parameters from simulations. In an interesting way, he showed us a lot of his knowledge about the mysterious topic of dark matter, cosmological simulations, galaxies, and neural networks, and supported it with graphs and simulations that he created himself from the data obtained by working on the research. This provided a concrete example of machine learning methods that can be used to predict the concentration of dark matter halos, which is essential for learning about inflation from large-scale structures in the Universe.

At the end of the lecture, Tijan treated us to more photos from California. He gave us an overview of the team of collaborators with whom he has been researching this topic and what his free time was like during his research visit to the USA.

The event was coordinated by Gregor Kržmanc, an ASEF Junior Fellow of the 2022 generation.

The ASEF Young Minds project is supported by the Office of the Republic of Slovenia for Youth and the Office of the Government of the Republic of Slovenia for Slovenes Abroad and the World.