Hi everyone -

It\'s been a while since the last post, so I thought I\'d tell you a little about my most recent trip.

I just got back from the CLASS08 conference in Germany. The meeting\'s theme was classification and discovery in large astronomical surveys. I was invited to talk about the new ideas underlying PICO (and also RICO which is not using Cosmology@Home, at least not yet) which allow us to solve what would otherwise be untractable problems in comparing astronomical observations with theory using massively parallel and widely distributed computing resources such as Cosmology@Home.

The conference site was pretty spectacular - Ringberg Castle is owned by the Max-Planck-Society, one of the major funding agencies for basic research in Germany. It\'s an original but idiosyncratic castle - built in the medieval style by a Bavarian duke in the beginning of the 20th century.

The other participants in the conference were all experts in the application of statistical and computational methods to extract information from astronomical surveys, and there were interesting talks about machine learning and automated discovery (programming computers to find interesting objects in mountains of data that could never be sifted through by human scientists).

Since our ideas have broad applications within and even beyond cosmology there was quite a lot of interest from the other conference participants and we identified some new promising application areas. Without giving too much away, one of which may help save the planet!

I\'ll keep you posted...

All the best,

Ben
____________
Creator of Cosmology@Home
Professor of Physics and Astronomy
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

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Is this the place where the conference were hold?