AI/ML APPLICATIONS IN
ASTRONOMY & ASTROPHYSICS

JANUARY 6 - 10, 2025, IUCAA, INDIA

About The Event

The workshop will be for young researchers and faculty with background in astronomy and astrophysics and interest in application of AI/ML techniques in Astronomy

The talks in the workshop will cover:
  1. Basics of AI/ML techniques, ranging from “traditional” machine learning to deep learning
  2. Generative AI, Transformers, Diffusion, Natural Language Processing, Large Language Models and other impactful and emerging techniques
  3. ML applications across A&A
Applications of the above AI techniques to various astronomical domains will be extensively covered. The domains will include, but not be limited to, cosmological simulations, galaxy morphology, spectral classification, Solar astronomy, gravitational waves and various aspects of time domain astronomy. The academic programme will consist of keynote and invited talks, shorter talks by young researchers, demo sessions and panel discussions.
Registration Deadline: 10 October 2024

Scientific Organising Committee

  • Ajit Kembhavi, IUCAA, Co – Chair
  • Arif Babul, University of Victoria, Co – Chair
  • Ashish Mahabal, Caltech
  • Kanak Saha, IUCAA, Coordinator
  • Ninan Sajeeth Philip, Airis4D and IUCAA
  • Prateek Sharma, IISc
  • T. Sivarani, IIA
  • M. Vivek, IIA
  • Yogesh Wadadekar, NCRA-TIFR
Participation will be by invitation only. Please fill the registration form provided in the Register section. There will be no registration fee for the meeting.
Local hospitality, including lodging and meals will be covered by the workshop as per IUCAA norms. Accommodation for invited participants will be provided in the IUCAA guest house, or in neighboring guest houses. Travel within India can be covered for a limited number of young researchers.

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For any queries please write email to - amaa@iucaa.in

Invited Speakers

Mark Allen


Strasbourg Astronomical Data Centre

Arif Babul


University of Victoria &anp; Indian Institute of Science

Arunima Banerjee


IISER, Tirupati

Anupam Bhardwaj


IUCAA, Pune

Federica Bianco


University of Delaware

Madhurima Choudhury


Brown University, USA

Michael Coughlin


University of Minnesota

Rishita Das


Indian Institute of Science

Shravan Hansoge


Tata Institute of Fundamental Research

Deoyani Nandrekar-Heinis


NIST, USA

Yashar Hezaveh


University of Montreal

Ajit Kembhavi


IUCAA

Ofer Lahav


University College London

Ashish Mahabal


California Institute of Technology

Rafael Martinez-Galarza


Center for Astrophysics Harvard Smithsonian

Lucio Mayer


University of Zurich

Anupreeta More


IUCAA

Suvodip Mukherjee


Tata Institute of Fundamental Research

Brandon Panos


FHNW Switzerland

Laurence Perreault-Levasseur


University of Montreal

Joe Philip


Tata Institute of Fundamental Research

Ninan Sajeeth Philip


airis4D and IUCAA

T. Sivarani


IIA, Bengaluru

Alex Szalay


Johns Hopkins University

Vishal Upendran


LMSAL & BAERI - Palo Alto

Francisco Villaescusa-Navarro


Flatiron Institute, Princeton University

M. Vivek


Indian Institute of Astrophysics

Yogesh Wadadekar


National Centre for Radio Astrophysics

Kaustubh Waghmare


Persistent Systems, Pune

Event Schedule

Click Here to view the programme Schedule

Breakfast at Chittaranjan

Registration and Badge Collection

Welcome speech by the Director, IUCAA

Morning Session, Chair: Arif Babul

AI/ML Overview with Astronomy Applications
Ajit Kembhavi

Generative AI and Astronomy
Ashish Mahabal

Tea Break

NLP techniques: Transformer architecture, attention mechanism, embeddings, etc. in the context of LLMs, SLMs, and LMMs
Ninan Sajeeth Philip

Writing astronomy codes with generative AI
Yogesh Wadadekar

Lunch at Chittaranjan

Afternoon Session, Chair: Ajit Kembhavi

Enabling LLMs to Reason Beyond Their Training Data
Kaustubh Waghmare

Hands-On 1, Writing astronomy codes with generative AI
Yogesh Wadadekar

Tea Break

Hands-On 2, Estimating Coronal temperatures using Bayesian Machine Learning
Nikita Balodhi

Hands-On 3, Leveraging Distance Metrics for Better Machine Learning
Siddharth Chaini

Snacks

Dinner at Chittaranjan

Breakfast at Chittaranjan

Morning Session, Chair: Ashish Mahabal

AI-ready data in Astrophysics
Alex Szalay

Progress and challenges for the use of AI in CDS services.
Mark Allen

Tea Break

TBD

NIST Data Management, Repository and AI techniques
Deoyani Nandrekar-Heinis

Lunch at Chittaranjan

Afternoon Session, Chair: Kanak Saha

Morphological Classification of galaxies using Machine Learning
Arunima Banerjee

Discovery of anomalous rotators and new evolutionary phases in red giants using machine learning
Shravan Hansoge

A Study Of YSOs in the Perseus Molecular Cloud using ML Techniques
Priya Hasan

SpecPT: Spectroscopy Pre-trained Transformer model for Galaxy Spectra
Rohan Pattnaik

Identifying lopsidedness in galaxies using a Deep Convolutional Neural Network
Biju Saha

Tea Break

Hands-On 4, MargNet: Compact Galaxies
Atharva Bagul

Snacks

Dinner at Chittaranjan

Breakfast at Chittaranjan

Morning Session, Chair: Durgesh Tripathi

Viewing the Sun through a Machine Learning Lens
Brandon Panos

TBD
Federica Bianco

Group Photo at Kund area

Tea Break

ML for exoplanets and instrumentation
Joe Philip

Automated classification of pulsating stars and their stellar parameters with machine learning
Anupam Bharadwaj

Lunch at Chittaranjan

Afternoon Session, Chair: Anupam Bharadwaj

Machine learning enhanced modeling of turbulent flow dynamics
Rishita Das

Spectroscopic Quasar Anomaly Detection
M. Vivek

From subtle to the vast: A multi-scale understanding of the Sun aided by artificial intelligence
Vishal Upendran

Tea Break

Pitfalls of using ChatGPT
Panel Discussion

Snacks

Dinner at Chittaranjan

Breakfast at Chittaranjan

Morning Session, Chair: TBD

Advancing science with ML/AI without falling prey to its siren song
Arif Babul

AI for Cosmological Experiments
Ofer Lahav

Tea Break

Cosmology in the machine learning era
Francisco Villaescusa-Navarro

AI/ML applications to stellar abundances and stellar population studies
T. Sivarani

Lunch at Chittaranjan

Afternoon Session, Chair: TBD

Multi-physics and multi-scale challenges in cosmic structure formation; from galaxy formation to black hole mergers with machine learning
Lucio Mayer

Deciphering the Epoch of Reionization using Neural Networks
Madhurima Choudhury

Parameter estimation from Lyman forest in Fourier space using Information Maximising Neural Network
Soumak Maitra

Estimation of Reionization Parameters from 21-cm Bispectrum using BNN-based Emulator
Yashrajsinh Mahida

ANN-Based Global 21-cm Signal Extraction with Chromatic Ionospheric Effects
Anshuman Tripathi

Tea Break

Hands-On 5, Galaxy Ring Detection
Linn Abraham

Snacks

Dinner at Chittaranjan

Breakfast at Chittaranjan

Morning Session, Chair: Yogesh Wadedekar

Machine Learning Applications to Gravitational Waves
Anupreeta More

Finding a Balance between Learning and Machine Learning in Gravitational Wave Astronomy
Suvodip Mukherjee

Fundamentals of Artificial Neural Networks and Convolutional Neural Networks
Badam Kushvah

Unveiling Patterns in High Dimensions: AI/ML Innovations in Multivariate Analysis, Dimension Reduction, and Clustering
Abisa Sinha

Tea Break

Gravitational wave forecasting with denoised signal using Deep Learning
Rohan Raha

Modelling strong lenses from the HSC Survey using convolutional neural networks
Priyanka Gawade

Improving astrophysical scaling relations with machine learning
Digvijay Wadekar

Performance Evaluation of Efficient Interpretable Attention Inception Model for Redshift Estimation
Snigdha Sen

Employing neural networks for learning theory parameters
Bihag Dave

Lunch at Chittaranjan

Afternoon Session, Chair: Suvodip Mukherjee

Future and Sustainability of AI
Panel Discussion

Conference Ends with Tea Break

Event Venue & Travel

IUCAA is located at the north end of the campus of the Savitribai Phule Pune University. The city of Pune is about 170 km south-east of Mumbai (Bombay) along the Mumbai-Pune expressway. Pune lies at an altitude of 559m and the climate is mostly pleasant.

If you arrive in Pune by train: If you are coming to Pune by Train, you can take a Taxi/Auto from the "Pune Station" to your place of stay. An Auto ride to IUCAA takes about 30 - 45 minutes depending on traffic. Please make your own arrangements to reach your place of stay.
If you arrive in Pune by air:
If you are arriving at Pune by air your can take a prepaid taxi or auto-rickshaw (~INR 245/-) from the Lohegaon Airport, Pune, which is about 13 kms from IUCAA. You can also book Ola/Uber Rides from respective counters at Lohegaon Airport.
The international airport closest to Pune is at Mumbai. Those coming from abroad can also enter the country through Delhi or Bengaluru airports. A number of flights from these airports to Pune are available all through the day and night.
If you are arriving in Mumbai, you may opt for one of the following:

  • By taxi - On the average the taxi-ride takes ~3.5 hrs, the distance is ~170 km and the cost is around INR 3,000/-. A taxi may be shared with another traveler headed for the same destination for the same total cost.
  • By train - You can take a train from Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus to Pune Railway Station.
  • By bus - You can take a bus from Dadar bus stand, from where air-conditioned buses leave frequently for Pune. Traveling by bus will cost around INR 750.

Inter University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics, Pune

The Inter-University centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA) is one of the premier research institutes in astronomy and astrophysics in India. The faculty at IUCAA have interests in theory, observations and instrumentation. It has a substantial number of visitors from various Indian universities and astronomy centres in the country and abroad. The workshop will be organised on the IUCAA campus, which is located in the verdant surroundings of the S. P. Pune University.

Visa Information

A visa must be obtained by most foreign nationals before traveling to India. All foreign nationals planning to participate in the meeting are therefore requested to apply for a Conference/Business visa through the Indian Consulate in their country.

In compliance with regulations, we will apply for clearance for the conference from the Ministry of Human Resource Development, Government of India. A copy of this clearance, which we expect to receive by mid-October, along with the invitation letter, will be sent to all registered participants requiring a visa. These documents are necessary for applying for a conference visa.

If your visa application form requires the name of a reference/contact person, please provide the following information:

Prof. Ajit Kembhavi
Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics,
Post Bag 4, S. P. Pune Univesity Campus, Ganeshkhind,
Pune-411007, India.
Phone : +91-20-2560 4100
Fax No. : +91-20-2560 4228
E-mail: amaa[at]iucaa.in


General Information

Restaurants located near by IUCAA:
There are various hotels / restaurants located near by IUCAA within ~5 K.M. For more information click here.

Places to visit in and around Pune:
Places you can visit in and around Pune can be found here.

Contact

For any more queries reach out to us

Address

IUCAA, S.P. Pune University Campus Pune 411007, India

Call Us

+91 20 2560 4100

Email Us

amaa@iucaa.in