Instituto de Física y Astronomía

August 18, 2015. IFA News 

On sunday August 16, the third version of the Escuela de Data Science de La Serena organized by REUNA commenced, in which students from all over the world (mainly chileans and northamericans) have the opportunity of establishing direct contact with one of the subjects of major proyection within the applied sciences: advances in knowledge by efficient use of great data bases. In this case, with applications  mainly related to astronomy (but with parallel subjects related to industry). In its third version, the school received around 200 applicants to a total of ~35 vacancies, making it a success from the beginning. This school prepares undergraduate students and those embarking on postgraduate studies for facing current day problems, applying state of the art techniques in fields like automatic classification, etc. It has an unusual and equilibrated distribution between talks given by professors and direct work in multidisciplinary workgroup projects (the students mainly come from three fields: computing, mathematics and statistics and physics and astronomy). Our Investigator from the Instituto de Fisica and Astronomia, Patricia Arevalo, forms part of the core nucleus of professors for this school, and one of our undergraduate students from the Licenciatura en Física Mención Astronomía was chosen to participate.

Interesting information about the areas covered by the school:

- computing, statistics and astronomy
- 45% chileans, 45% northamericans, 10% from the rest of the world
- combination of projects and classes

The school is sponsored by AURA, LSST y NOAO, and relies on financing from the National Science Foundation (NSF). In Chile it is backed by the Centro de Modelamiento Matemático de la Universidad de Chile (CMM-UChile), the Instituto del Milenio de Astrofísica (MAS), the Universidad de La Serena and REUNA, as well as CONICYT.

The students visited the Santuario de la Oscuridad near Pisco Elqui, event covered by chilean television Channel 13. The sanctuary corresponds to the location where Gabriela Mistral, our Nobel Prize for Literature was laid to rest.

Links: Escuela de Data Science de La Serena