Outline of the School

The primary aim of this XXX Winter School is to educate the next generation of astronomers in analysis techniques that can be used to digest the gigantic amounts of data that will be produced by the next generation of telescopes and surveys. It will include lectures but also tutorials on advanced statistics and machine learning techniques. We intent to review the current state of the topic and educate the students by providing an overview of the main groups of machine learning techniques as well as the most used software. By the end of the school, the students will come back to their home institutions armed with a set of skills and tools that will allow them to make in-depth use of particular set of algorithms that fit best to their research.

Given its broad scope, the School is addressed to students in any research field in astronomy, and using different kinds of data, observational and theoretical. 

Renowned specialists in the field will lecture on the following topics:

  • General overview on the use of machine learning techniques in astronomy: past, present and perspectives. (Prof. S. George Djorgovski)
  • Data challenges and solutions in forthcoming surveys. (Prof. Mario Juric)
  • Machine learning methods for non-supervised classification and dimension reduction techniques. (Dalya Baron)
  • Supervised learning: classification and regression. (Prof. Michael Biehl)
  • Deep learning. (Prof. Marc Huertas-Company)

Lectures will be complemented by tutorials consisting in implementing small projects with a design and scope based on what the students will learn during the machine learning lectures. Participants of the Winter School will have the opportunity to display their current work by presenting a poster.

The Winter School will take place in San Cristóbal de La Laguna (Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain) from Sunday 4th to Saturday 10th November 2018.The lectures, which will take place from Monday to Friday, will be delivered in English. Speakers will present their topics in a series of four lectures. Additionally, there will be two tutorial sessions. Links to the material used by the lecturers as well as videos of the lectures will be made available on the website of the XXX Winter School. Visits to the IAC's Headquarter in La Laguna, the Teide Observatory in Tenerife and the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory in La Palma will be scheduled as part of the activities.

Those interested in attending the Winter School should register following the instructions provided in the Registration page. Once registered, please login to the personal area of the website and complete the required information. In addition we request a letter of reference from a thesis advisor or Head of Department which should be emailed to winter@iac.es. These should reach the IAC before June 17th. Selected candidates will be informed by middle July.