Research projects

Ongoing research projects

• Interstellar travel, e.g. navigation and solar sails
• Origins of interstellar objects (ISOs, so far we know two: 1I/'Oumuamua and 2I/Borisov
  (and before you ask: they are extremely unlikely to be alien spacecraft. We need not point at aliens to fill gaps in understanding)
• Close encounters of the stellar kind (ADS) (see also other publications)
• astroimpacts: Astronomical impacts on terrestrial climate and biodiversity (mass extinctions)
• Bayesian distance inference
• Gaia Galactic survey mission
• Machine learning from big data
  • quasar and galaxy classification with Gaia
  • stellar parameter estimation
  • finding rare objects
  • forward modelling with ILIUM
• Three dimensional dust mapping in the Milky Way (see publications)
• Time series modelling, e.g. for event data or a general Bayesian method (see also other publications)

Some earlier projects

• Substellar (brown dwarf) luminosity and mass function in stellar clusters (see publications)
• Classification and parametrization of unresolved galaxy spectra (e.g. this paper)
• Rotation, variability and atmospheres of ultracool dwarfs
• Infrared parallax measurements of T dwarfs
• Gaia Classification working group
• Angular momentum evolution and disks in low mass stars in young open clusters (see publications)
• Design of photometric systems using evolutionary algorithms
• Omega 2000: A wide field near infrared camera
• Modelling of materials forging for the prediction of microstructure
• Gaussian Process modelling
• Neural network classification of stellar spectra

Algorithms and software

• Various R codes for data analysis and simulation
• A few things on my github repository
• Orbital integration code, used in Close encounters of the stellar kind
• ctsmod: a Bayesian method for modelling time series
• artmod, a Bayesian time series analysis method for time-of-arrival data. Used in the impact crater modelling project
• Aeneas (formerly "q method"), a Bayesian method for estimating stellar parameters and line-of-sight interstellar extinction using photometry/spectra, apparent magnitude, parallax and the HRD
• ILIUM. A forward-model based algorithm for estimating parameters from multivariate data
• PanDiSC and PanSteP: classifier and stellar parametrizer for Pan-STARRS
• statnet: a feedforward interpolation neural network
• dynet: a recurrent neural network for dynamic process modelling
• photsim: a photometric simulator (simulates photon counts and noise in arbitrary filters
  for a specified instrument model given a source spectral energy distribution)
• HFD: Heuristic Filter Design (automatically design photometric systems
  to parametrizer or isolate specified types of objects)