Mark Cheung, Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Center (chair)
Mark Cheung is a Senior Staff Physicist at Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Center in Palo Alto, California. His scientific investigations take place at the intersection of research themes connecting the Sun with Earth, magnetic fields with plasmas, and machine learning with space physics. As principal investigator for the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly onboard NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory mission, various Heliophysics research grants, and mentor for the Frontier Development Lab, he works with teams of scientists and engineers who operate space telescopes, perform data mining and data analysis on terabyte- and petabyte-scale data archives, develop massively parallel numerical simulation codes, and apply machine learning techniques for scientific discovery and space exploration. Mark studied at the University of Adelaide, Australia and the University of Göttingen, Germany before moving to California in 2006. He is a recipient of the Otto Hahn Medal from the Max Planck Society and the Karen Harvey Prize from the American Astronomical Society.
Atılım Güneş Baydin, University of Oxford, UK
Atılım Güneş Baydin is a postdoctoral researcher in Torr Vision Group at the University of Oxford, working at the intersection of probabilistic programming, simulator-based inference, and deep learning. His current work is on enabling efficient probabilistic inference in large-scale simulators in particle physics, focusing on distributed training and inference at supercomputing scale. He collaborates with researchers at CERN, NASA, ESA, and other institutions on applications of machine learning in the physical sciences. He is also a Research Member of the Common Room at Kellogg College and a research consultant to Microsoft Research Cambridge. He received his PhD in artificial intelligence from Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona. His other research interests include automatic differentiation, hyperparameter optimization, and evolutionary algorithms.
Bill Diamond, SETI Institute, Mountain View, CA, USA
Bill Diamond is a Silicon Valley veteran and current President and CEO of the SETI Institute. The SETI Institute is a non-profit astrophysics and astrobiology research and education organization focused on the study of life in the Universe. Prior to joining the Institute, Mr. Diamond held various executive management positions in applied technologies, most recently at the optical networking company, Oclaro, Inc. Executive leadership roles include CEO positions at WaveSplitter Technologies, DenseLight Semiconductor (Singapore) and Xradia, Inc., now part of Zeiss. His photonics background also includes six years with AT&T Bell Laboratory’s Optoelectronics business unit and five years as President of US operations for the Swiss technology company, Comet A.G. He is a past member of the Advisory Board for the McDonough School of Business Administration at Georgetown and is a current member of the Optical Society of America, the International Astronomical Congress and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He is also a member of the Board of Directors of the Bay Area Science and Innovation Council, BASIC.
Massimo Mascaro, Google Cloud, Mountain View, CA, USA
Massimo is part of the Office of the CTO for Google Cloud and, in this role, he helps Google Cloud customers reimagine their businesses by leveraging the power of AI and the products from Google that enable it. Prior to Google he worked at Intuit where he founded and led the data science group as chief data scientist and director of data engineering for the consumer group. Massimo also worked as lead of R&D at Intellisis, a San Diego startup that builds advanced speech processing software for various US government and defense entities. Prior to that he was at Microsoft, both in the Core Ranking team for Bing and in the Technical Computing Team. Massimo started in theoretical physics and has a PhD in Neuroscience. In his research work he studied the dynamics of large recurrent neural networks, their connections with attention and the ability of networks to mesh signals from different modalities.
Andrés Muñoz-Jaramillo, Southwest Research Institute, Boulder, CO, USA
Andrés is currently a Senior Research Scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. He is interested in the homogenization and calibration of historical and modern data in order to enable the study of solar long-term variability. Andrés is a veteran team lead in the Frontier Development Laboratory, a public private partnership between NASA and industrial partners like Google, IBM, and Intel. As part of the FDL he has collaborated in the use of machine learning techniques to forecast space weather events, the reconstruction of ultra-violet solar irradianceand the calibration and super-resolution of solar magnetograms super-resolution.
James Parr, Trillium Technologies, Frontier Development Lab (FDL) (in partnership with NASA) & FDL Europe (ESA)
James is the founder and CEO of Trillium Technologies - a technology contractor that specialises in the application of emerging technologies to grand challenges, such as climate change, violent extremism, prevention strategies for cancer and obesity, deforestation mitigation, climate resilience and planetary defence from asteroids.
He is Executive Producer of FDL an AI research accelerator based in Silicon Valley in partnership with NASA and the SETI Institute and Director of FDL Europe, in partnership with ESA. He is also founder of the Open Space Agency (OSA) - which is dedicated to democratisation of space exploration through citizen science and open hardware.
He lives in London with his wife and twin daughters.
Rajat Thomas, University of Amsterdam, NL
Rajat Thomas is an assistant professor at the University of Amsterdam, focussing on the application of machine learning to various domains including, engineering, neuroscience, and physics. Rajat obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Groningen, where he built fast computational models to simulate the Epoch of Reionization; the ionization of the Universe by the first generation of stars, blackholes, and galaxies. His masters in Chalmers were in Space Sciences and his thesis, done at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, resulted in a genetic algorithm-based search technique for extrasolar planets. His other interests include distributed computing and graph analytics.