22 April: Rhys Shaw

Speaker: Rhys Shaw (University of Bristol)

Date: Wednesday 22 April 2026

Time: 15:00

Location: Physics 3.21 Berry

Sims to Query: A look through the astronomical data lifecycle for the next generation of surveys

Next-generation missions like the Euclid space telescope are producing unprecedented volumes of data, requiring the use of diverse computational tools that span the entire data lifecycle. In this seminar, I will present four projects that follow this data journey from initial simulation through to discovery and querying. First, I will discuss an ongoing project to generate realistic mock Euclid images directly from cosmological simulations. Next, I will introduce DRUID, a novel source finder built using persistent homology. I will then demonstrate the application of dimensionality reduction techniques to classify and identify unusual astronomical objects, using Euclid Q1 data. Finally, I will present STILTS-NLI, a small, accessible fine-tuned model that translates natural language inputs into STILTS commands.