Data Science Coast to Coast Presents: Alex Szalay

Alex Szalay

Professor, Departments of Physics and Astronomy, Computer Science, The Johns Hopkins University

View Recording

From Sky Surveys to Cancer: Spatial Data Everywhere

The talk describes a 25 year journey leading from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey to a wide range of projects in data science. There are many common threads: the need for extreme interactivity, the need for flexible data aggregation and the commonality of spatial data. The size of data sets have grown almost a million fold, but user expectations for almost instant results has not changed. The talk will describe the gradual evolution of the SciServer, and how new interactive metaphors to interact with hundreds of terabytes of turbulence simulations emerged. We will discuss how machine learning and AI tools are transforming science, from simulations to how large experiments are designed and executed. We will also emphasize that much of these new developments still rely on having unique high value data sets at our fingertips, and how the long term survival of these is entering a critical, endangered phase.

Watch Alex Szalay play the guitar with his band, Panta Rhei here.