Topic: gravitational-wave astrophysics

Cole, Cormac and new host Sanika discuss gravitational-wave astrophysics: neutron-star and black-hole mergers, LIGO and Virgo observations, and future detectors including LISA. The conversation introduces both the scientific signals and the research questions driving the field.

Recent high-profile scientific achievements by machine learning (ML) and especially deep learning (DL) systems have reinvigorated interest in ML for automated scientific discovery (eg, Wang et al. 2023). Much of this work is motivated by the thought that DL methods might facilitate the efficient discovery of phenomena, hypotheses, or even models or theories more efficiently than traditional, theory-driven approaches to discovery. This talk considers some of the more specific obstacles to automated, DL-driven discovery in frontier science, focusing on gravitational-wave astrophysics (GWA) as a