Prof. Frédéric Courbin

Get to know your neighbors – Seminar Series

“Intelligent systems for astrophysics and cosmology”

Prof. Frédéric Courbin – Laboratory of Astrophysics

Monday Nov. 23, 2020 – 3:15 – 4:15pm (UTC+01:00)

Prof. Frederic Courbin

The next decade will see transformational moves in observational astrophysics and cosmology, with a clear transition from very specific “pointed” observations to whole-sky surveys spanning the whole electromagnetic spectrum and with the additional time dimension, not to mention gravitational waves!

I will present this new paradigm with enhanced discovery space, show its benefits, but also illustrates the challenges it poses in terms of data acquisition and data processing. The complexity of the new type of data and new type of observatories require to design, build and operate autonomous networks of telescopes around the globe, i.e. intelligent systems will the core of astronomical research in the very near future.

Frédéric Courbin obtained his PhD at the connection between image processing and cosmology at the University of Liège (Belgium) before moving for 3 years to Chile which hosts most of the main astronomical facilities in the world. He then returned to Europe with a Marie Curie Fellowship and is now an adjunct professor at the Laboratory of Astrophysics (LASTRO).
 
Fred is known for the development of image deconvolution techniques that preserve the photometric properties of astronomical data, a work that won him the De Boelpaepe prize in image processing of the Royal Academy of Science of Belgium. Thanks to these techniques and other ones, he is studying the natural phenomenon of gravitational lensing to measure the expansion rate of the universe, a topic currently under intense debate and possibly implying new physics. This work was acknowledged with an ERC Advanced grant (COSMICLENS) in 2018.

Fred also holds key positions in the ESA Euclid mission that will map the whole extragalactic sky from space from 2022 to 2030. In 2020, he was granted the builder status in the Euclid consortium, acknowledging his long-term effort and leading roles that led to the adoption of the mission by ESA in 2011.