Exploring Dark Energy and Star Formation with ML with Viviana Acquaviva

In today's episode of our Strata Data series, we're joined by Viviana Acquaviva, Associate Professor at City Tech, the New York City College of Technology. Viviana led a tutorial at the conference, titled "Learning Machine Learning using Astronomy data sets." In our conversation, we begin by discussing an ongoing project she's a part of called the "Hobby-Eberly Telescope Dark Energy eXperiment," or HETDEX. In this project, Viviana tackles the challenge of understanding of how and why the expansion of the universe is accelerating, which is directly contrary to the principles of gravity. We discuss her motivation for undertaking this project, how she gets her data, the models she uses, and how she evaluates their performance.