Hybrid Seminar Series

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The first half of the Fall seminar series will focus on AI surrogate models for physical systems. During the second half of the semester, each CosmicAI working group will present an update on their progress.

All talks are 1-2pm CT (2-3pm ET) - Zoom and in person

Zoom Link for all meetings https://utexas.zoom.us/j/88630218251?pwd=OLbanw8MQXVnsiho5qaGjdPKxe98Ea.1
Meeting ID: 886 3021 8251 / Passcode: 684859

Theme: Surrogate Modeling of (Astro) Physical Systems

August 26th

Welcome & 2026 Director’s Report: NSF-Simons CosmicAI through Year 2 and Beyond

Dr. Stella Offner (Curtis T. Vaughan Jr. Centennial Chair in Astronomy at the University of Texas at Austin and CosmicAI PI & Director)
Location: UT Austin, POB 4.304
Description

Emulators for Asteroseismology / Physics Based Deep Learning for Stellar Structure Equations

September 9th

Earl Bellinger (Assistant Professor at Yale University) and Manuel Ballester (Wyant College of Optical Sciences, University of Arizona)

Location: UT Austin, POB 4.304
Description

Real time Bayesian inversion, prediction, and OED for tsunami early warning

September 16th

Omar Ghattas (Professor, Walker Department of Mechanical Engineering and Oden Institute, University of Texas at Austin)
Location: UT Austin, POB 4.304
Description

Part 1: Structure Without a Grid: Extracting and Tracking Topological Features in Continuous Models of Scientific Data

Part 2: Enhancing Operator Learning with Invertible Architectures and Multi-Functional Diffusion

September 30th

Dr. Bei Wang Phillips (Associate Professor at University of Utah) and Dr. Shandian Zhe (Associate Professor at Kahlert School of Computing, University of Utah)
Location: University of Utah
Description

Accelerated Universe WG
Part 1: From astrochemical models to surrogate models: understanding the chemistry of star formation

Part 2: Adaptive Reduced-Order Model for Parametric Chemical Kinetics

Part 3: Tree-based adaptive approximation

October 14th

Mélisse Bonfand-Caldeira (Postdoc at the University of Virginia), Arjun Vijaywargiya (Postdoctoral Fellow at The Oden Institute, UT Austin), and George Biros (W. A. ``Tex'' Moncrief Chair in Simulation-Based Engineering Sciences in the Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences)
Location: UT Austin, POB 4.304
Description

October 28th

Observable Universe WG
Part 1: The Observable Universe Working Group: progress and prospects

Part 2: SIFARI: Self-Supervised Neural Networks for High-Resolution Radio Imaging

Part 3: LabelScope: Context-Aware Discovery of Label Outliers in Radio Astronomy Signals

Speaker: Brian Mason (Scientist, NSF NRAO), Shunyuan Mao (CosmicAI Postdoctoral Fellow at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory), El Kindi Rezig (Assistant Professor, University of Utah’s Kahlert School of Computing)
Location: NSF NRAO (Auditorium)
Description

Speaker: TBD
Location: TBD

Explorable Universe WG

November 18th

December 2nd

Speaker: TBD
Location: TBD (UT or UVA)

Explainable Universe WG

Hybrid Seminar Videos

10/30/26

CosmicAI Hybrid Seminar - Observable Universe

Part 1: The Observable Universe Working Group: progress and prospects Speaker: Brian Mason (Scientist, NSF NRAO)

Part 2: SIFARI: Self-Supervised Neural Networks for High-Resolution Radio Imaging Speaker: Shunyuan Mao (CosmicAI Postdoctoral Fellow at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory)

Part 3: LabelScope: Context-Aware Discovery of Label Outliers in Radio Astronomy Signals Speaker: El Kindi Rezig (Assistant Professor, University of Utah’s Kahlert School of Computing)
10/16/26

CosmicAI Hybrid Seminar - Accelerated Universe

Part 1: From astrochemical models to surrogate models: understanding the chemistry of star formation Speaker: Mélisse Bonfand-Caldeira (Postdoc at the University of Virginia)

Part 2: Adaptive Tree Reduced-Order Model for Parametric Chemical Kinetics Speaker: Arjun Vijaywargiya (Postdoctoral Fellow at The Oden Institute, University of Texas at Austin)

Part 3: Tree-based adaptive approximation Speaker: George Biros (W. A. ``Tex'' Moncrief Chair in Simulation-Based Engineering Sciences in the Oden Institute)
10/1/26

Enhancing Operator Learning with Invertible Architectures and Multi-Functional Diffusion

Speaker: Dr. Shandian Zhe (Associate Professor at Kahlert School of Computing, University of Utah)
9/18/26

Real time Bayesian inversion, prediction, and OED for tsunami early warning

Speaker: Dr. Omar Ghattas (Professor, Walker Department of Mechanical Engineering and Oden Institute, University of Texas at Austin)
9/11/26

Physics Based Deep Learning for Stellar Structure Equations

Speaker: Manuel Ballester (Wyant College of Optical Sciences, University of Arizona)
9/11/26

Emulators for Asteroseismology

Speaker: Earl Bellinger (Assistant Professor at Yale University)
8/27/26

Welcome & 2026 Director’s Report: NSF-Simons CosmicAI through Year 2 and Beyond

Speaker: Dr. with Stella Offner (Curtis T. Vaughan Jr. Centennial Chair in Astronomy at the University of Texas at Austin and CosmicAI PI & Director)
4/30/26

Will Humans Make the Greatest Astronomy Discoveries of the Future?

Speaker: Ann Zabludoff (Professor of Astronomy, University of Arizona)
4/30/26

How close are language models to becoming autonomous and trustworthy scientists?

Speaker: Peter Jansen (Associate Professor at the University of Arizona, and Visiting Research Scientist at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence)
4/20/26

Controlling LLM's via Activation Geometry w/ Amirali Abdullah (Lead AI Researcher, Thoughtworks Inc)

Speaker: Amirali Abdullah (Lead AI Researcher, Thoughtworks Inc)
4/20/26

AI for Multi-Wavelength X-ray Spectral Analysis with Professor Shiqi Yu (University of Utah)

Speaker: Professor Shiqi Yu (Research Assistant Professor, Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Utah)
4/3/26

Short Stories of AI in, and for, Astronomy

Speaker: Dr. John Wu (Space Telescope Science Institute)
4/3/26

Cosmic Co-Discovery with AI

Speaker: Dr. Ioana Ciuca (Stanford University)
- Hybrid Seminars
• 3/25/26
Encoding the nearby Universe with FM-ISM

Speaker: Dalya Baron, Research Scientist, Stanford University
- Hybrid Seminars
• 3/4/26
LLM Reasoning Beyond Scaling

Presenter: Greg Durrett, Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science and the Center for Data Science, New York University
- Hybrid Seminars
• 3/4/26
Cosmo3DFlow Powering the Digital Twin of the Universe

Presenter: Dr. Judy Fox, Associate Professor, School of Data Science, University of Virginia.
- Hybrid Seminars
• 2/18/26
Olmo 3: State-of-the-art in fully open models

Presenter: Kyle Lo, Lead Research Scientist, Allen Institute for AI (AI2)
- Hybrid Seminars
• 2/18/26
AI-Assisted Peer Review at Scale The AAAI-26 AI Review Pilot

Presenter: Joydeep Biswas, Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science, The University of Texas at Austin, and Associate Director of Texas Robotics.
- Hybrid Seminars
• 2/4/26
Trade-offs in LLM-Supported Research Ideation

Speaker: Houjiang Liu (PhD student), School of Information, The University of Texas at Austin.
- Hybrid Seminars
• 2/4/26
Responsible AI for Science: Benefits vs Risks

Speaker: Matt Lease, Professor of Information, UT Austin & Co-Director, CosmicAI.
- Hybrid Seminars
• 1/21/26
Foundation Models for Survey Astronomy

Speaker: François Lanusse, CNRS Research Scientist, Université Paris-Saclay, Université Paris Cité, CEA, CNRS, AIM
- Hybrid Seminars
• 1/21/26
Unexpected Insights from Astronomical Data

Speaker: Stéphanie Juneau (NSF NOIRLab, CosmicAI)
- Hybrid Seminars
• 12/4/25
Towards AI-driven Radio Image Reconstruction

Speaker: Omkar Bait
- Hybrid Seminars
• 12/4/25
Light Scattering of Irregular Grains with Neural Networks

Speaker: Zhé-Yǔ Daniel Lín
- Hybrid Seminars
• 11/12/25
Disentangling Cosmology from Observational Artifacts

Speakers: Kyle Dawson - Professor, Department of Physics and Astronomy at University of Utah, and Tyler Hagen, Ph.D. Candidate at University of Utah
- Hybrid Seminars
• 10/31/25
Time-Series Modeling of High-Resolution Radio Spectra

Speaker: Josh Taylor, Research Associate, Oden Institute.
- Hybrid Seminars
• 10/31/25
Finding Exotic Transients in the Era of Big Data

Speaker: Sebastian Gomez, Assistant Professor of Astronomy at The University of Texas at Austin.
- Hybrid Seminars
• 10/16/25
Strategies for variance reduction in spectral unmixing

Speaker: Jordan Bryan, Assistant Professor of Data Science, UVA.
- Hybrid Seminars
• 10/15/25
Encoding of Spectra and Time Series

Speaker: Peter Melchior (Assistant Professor of Statistical Astronomy, Princeton University)
- Hybrid Seminars
• 10/3/25
Compound AI Systems: How Publisher AI Helps Researchers

Speaker: Dustin Smith (Co-founder and CEO, hum.works)
10/3/25

Machine Learning for Reviewer-Proposal Matching in ALMA Distributed Peer Review

Speaker: John Carpenter (ALMA Observatory Scientist)
- Hybrid Seminars
• 9/17/25
Computer Vision for Scientific Discovery

Speaker: Zezhou Cheng, Tenure-track assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Virginia
- Hybrid Seminars
• 9/17/25
Accelerating (Astro)chemical discovery with machine learned atomistic models

Speaker: Kelvin Lee, Senior Scientific Machine Learning Engineer at NVIDIA
- Hybrid Seminars
• 9/9/25
Imaging in Radio Interferometry - What do we measure, model and make decisions about?

Speaker: Urvashi Rau-Venkata is an algorithm scientist with 20+ years of experience in image reconstruction techniques and data analysis software for radio interferometry.
- Conference Talks
• 5/14/25
(Machine) Learning of Dark Matter

Speaker: Lina Necib, Assistant Professor, MIT.
- Hybrid Seminars
• 5/1/25
Exploring the LLM universe for astronomy research

Speakers: Dr. Jessy Li, an associate professor of Natural Language Processing and Computational Linguistics in the Department of Linguistics at UT Austin, and Sebastian Joseph, a first-year Ph.D. student in Computer Science at UT Austin.
- Hybrid Seminars
• 4/14/25
Transcending the Limits of Astrostatistics with Machine Learning Methods

Speaker: Yuan-Sen Ting, Associate Professor at Ohio State | Adjunct Scientist at Max Planck Institute
- Hybrid Seminars
• 4/3/25
Structure preserving, Low Parameter, Interpretable, Operator Learning

Speaker: Varun Shankar, Assistant Professor in the Kahlert School of Computing at the University of Utah
- Hybrid Seminars
• 3/19/25
Science with massive radio datasets enabled using AI/ML

Speaker: Dr. Mark Lacy, Scientist, National ALMA Science Center, at NRAO Charlottesville
- Hybrid Seminars
• 3/5/25
Cosmological Emulators for High Dimensional Inference

Speaker: Dr. Mahdi Qezlou, ‪HETDEX - Cosmology Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Texas at Austin
- Hybrid Seminars
• 1/29/25
Learning how Stars Form: Harnessing AI to Identify Structures in Noisy Spectral Cubes

Speaker: Dr. Stella Offner (UT Austin)