Solving astrophysics mysteries with big data | Melanie Johnston-Hollitt | TEDxChristchurch

Ever since she was a small child, Melanie Johnston-Hollitt has been fascinated by the night sky. Now, as one of the lead astrophysicists for the Murchison Widefield Array and the Square Kilometre Array, she faces a new problem: how to extract knowledge from the petabytes of data her teams are amassing. It's time for new algorithms: algorithms that can be used not only to make sense of the night sky but also to transform the way we solve problems right here at home.

Professor Melanie Johnston-Hollitt is an internationally prominent radio astronomer working in the space between astrophysics, computer science and big data. She is Director of Astronomy & Astrophysics at Victoria University of Wellington, Chair of the Board of the 60 million dollar Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) radio telescope and a founding member of the Board of Directors of the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) Organisation, which is tasked with building the World’s largest radio telescope. In her nearly 20 year career, Prof. Johnston-Hollitt has been involved in design, construction and operation of several major radio telescopes including the Low Frequency Array in the Netherlands, the MWA in Australia and the SKA which will be hosted in both Australia and South Africa. These instruments produce massive quantities of data, in the case of the SKA it will be in the realms of exabytes per day requiring new and disruptive technologies to allow value to be extracted from the data deluge.

This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at http://ted.com/tedx

Видео Solving astrophysics mysteries with big data | Melanie Johnston-Hollitt | TEDxChristchurch канала TEDx Talks