I’ve had the pleasure of attending the COSMO21 conference in Valencia, Spain, which was preceded by the ADA summer school on astronomy data analysis techniques. The focus of both was on current and future milestones in cosmology and on new methods and tools that we can use to analyze the upcoming, revolutionary data sets.
The latter consisted of talks and hands-on sessions on sparsity, Bayesian statistics, and machine learning, all of which were excellent. I particularly enjoyed building a deep neural network from scratch, using only numpy, and implementing all the different components by hand in a nice, object-focused fashion.
For the conference, I was impressed not only by the great and consistent quality of the talks (hence I won’t recommend individual ones), but also by the diversity of the speakers. In general, I thought this was one of the best-organized conferences/workshops I’ve ever been to, and I really appreciate the work done by the SOC/LOC and by Samuel Farrens in particular.
Daniel Lenz 