Data: The Past, the Present and the Future

Digital technology from the early 1990s onwards produced an exponential increase in astronomical data. Within our lifetime, the entirety of the visible universe will have been mapped out: we will have seen everything there is to see. The question will then be: what does it all mean?

Solving the mysteries of dark matter and dark energy (which together account for 95% of the universe) and finding life elsewhere in the universe won't be possible without statistical and data analysis methods that have yet to be invented. No human eye will ever inspect all the 50 billion galaxies in the visible universe, nor the 7,500 billion potentially habitable planetary systems: we need machines to do it for us.

This lecture will explore how artificial intelligence (AI) will meet the challenges posed by big data to help answer fundamental questions of the cosmos.

A lecture by Richard Harvey 24 November

The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College website:
https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/data-future

Gresham College has been giving free public lectures since 1597. This tradition continues today with all of our five or so public lectures a week being made available for free download from our website. There are currently over 2,000 lectures free to access or download from the website.

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