Adam Miller
Assistant Professor, Department of Physics and Astronomy, Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences
Adam Miller is an assistant professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Northwestern University. He completed his PhD at UC Berkeley, where he first developed an interest in exploding stars and the application of machine learning models to astronomical time-series data.
His research group works at the intersection of data science and astronomy, where they are focused on determining the stellar progenitor systems that produce the various explosions we observe in nature. In 2023, his group produced the first-ever fully automated observation, detection, identification, request for follow-up, spectroscopic classification, and public announcement of an exploding white dwarf star.
Adam is a co-chair for science in the NSF-Simons AI Institute for the Sky (SkAI), the Director of the LSST-DA Data Science Fellowship Program, and the Director of the La Silla Southern Sky Survey (LS4) a new astrophysics experiment designed to find exploding stars.
Keynote Address
Ten Billion Galaxies! Ushering In the Petabyte Era in Astronomy and Astrophysics
There is an ongoing revolution in wide-field, time-domain surveys - large experiments designed to map changes across the night sky over many years. By repeatedly imaging the same portions of the sky, astronomers can discover stellar eruptions in the Milky Way as well as stars that explode in extremely distant galaxies.
The time-domain revolution will be punctuated later this year with the start of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), which will discover 2000 new exploding stars every night. In this talk, I will describe successes and challenges associated with the application of machine learning models to the streaming time-domain data provided by surveys like LSST, and I will highlight some of the ongoing work being done at Northwestern to address these challenges (such as our automated discovery of new stellar explosions).
I will conclude by discussing where the field is heading and the new NSF-Simons AI Institute for the Sky - SkAI - a new multi-university research center led by Northwestern.