DiSCourse Seminar with Sebastian Grandis
6 March 2026, 12:00 (CET), hybrid
Digital Science Center, Innrain 15, 1st floor, Open Space Area or Big Blue Button
DiSCourse - The Digital Science Seminar Series on:
Data Science in Cosmology
Several aspects of Data Science are central to observational cosmology, which aims to infer the structure and evolution of the Universe from observations of extragalactic sources collected by ever more powerful observatories. Inference from such observations of the Cosmos proceeds in the framework of Bayesian inference. In recent years, these have been increasingly supplemented by tailored AI tools. In this seminar, we outline four applications of advanced data science techniques: 1) the inference of cosmological parameters from the distribution of observed quantities of galaxy clusters (SG+19,24, Bocquet&SG+24a,b;+25), 2) the deep learning based generation of realistic images of galaxies for image simulations for the ongoing European Space Agency (ESA) mission Euclid (EC:Csizi,Schrabback,SG+25), 3) the decomposition of populations of galaxies in different classes with variational inference (SG+ in prep), and 4) the design of deep learning segmentation algorithms of set-like datasets for the forthcoming ESA mission Plato (Masterthesis Gobold 2025). These examples showcase the wide range of data science applications needed to further our understanding of the Cosmos from the large amount of observations provided by current and future astronomical observations like the ESA missions Euclid and Plato.
Sebastian Grandis, University of Innsbruck
Sebastian Grandis is a Senior Scientist at the Institute for Astro- and Particle Physics at the University of Innsbruck. His primary research interest is to map large-scale structures in the Cosmos and their evolution over cosmic time through extragalactic observations. Using advanced inference and AI models, he analyzes these data to determine the composition of the Universe, finding that it is dominated by two yet unknown forms of energy density outside the standard model of particle physics: Dark Matter and Dark Energy.